“It can engage autonomously, but we don’t recommend it,” he says with a smile. Amir Alon, a senior director at Elbit Systems, the Israeli defense firm that created the Seagull, tells me that it can also be equipped with a remotely operated machine gun and torpedoes that launch from the deck. One autonomous speedboat, the Seagull, is designed to hunt mines and submarines by dragging a sonar array in its wake. “Everything we do here supports the crew vessels.” But some of the robot ships involved in the exercise illustrate how short the distance between unarmed and armed can be-a matter of swapping payloads and tweaking software. “The current focus of Task Force 59 is enhancing visibility,” Brasseur says. We don’t want to start World War III.”īrasseur and others at the base stress that the autonomous systems they’re testing are for sensing and detection only, not for armed intervention. “It can engage autonomously, but we don’t recommend it. It has been just a day since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the conversational interface that would break the internet. In truth, we don’t know the half of it yet. Instead, we talk about AI image generators and whether they’ll put artists out of a job, about how civilian society seems to be reaching its own inflection point with artificial intelligence. Because the Fifth Fleet operates in a different region, those on Task Force 59 don’t have much information about what’s going on in Ukraine, she says. But these conversations will not be possible, says my chaperone, a reservist from the social media company Snap. I want to ask them about a recent attack on the Russian-occupied naval base in Sevastopol, which involved a number of Ukrainian-built drone boats bearing explosives-and a public crowdfunding campaign to build more.
I’m eager to talk with them about the war in Ukraine and the heavy use of drones there, from hobbyist quadcopters equipped with hand grenades to full-on military systems. During the journey, I fall into conversation with the crew. The deck cools in the wind as the cutter heads back to base in Manama, Bahrain.
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