The notion of deploying armed human soldiers on the ground to fight wars will disappear over time, according to one of America's top military scientists. "We have to get used to the radical idea that we, human beings, will be just one species of intelligent beings," Alexander Kott, chief of the Network Science Division of the US Army Research Laboratory, told the Conference on Applied Machine Learning for Information Security (CAMLIS) on Friday. Kott predicted a dystopian future where human warriors share the battlefield with intelligent agents in the form of robots, sensors, smart weapons, autonomous vehicles, and wearable gizmos. These exist today to some degree, however, in the future they will be much more intelligent, and use machine-learning software to automatically take in fresh information and make decisions in a constantly changing environment. "It's coming and will be a reality in 20 years," Kott said.