Unity has released a new SDK supporting machine learning agents in the Unity gaming engine. This enables you to:
- Study complex multi agent behaviors in realistic competitive and cooperative scenarios. This is a lot safer than doing it with robots.
- Study multi-agent behavior for industrial robotics, autonomous vehicles and other applications in a realistic environment.
- Create intelligent agents for your games.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/09/19/introducing-unity-machine-learning-agents/
The benefits of this is that it will be a lot easier to develop and test learning algorithms that can later be used in real life. There is also a potential danger. In the same way that we can test industry robots, autonomous vehicles etc that can then be ported into the real world. We will inevitably see very smart ai agents that drive opponents in realistic war games. These can also be ported into the real world.
Since deep reinforcement learning can beat any human player in any game, the more realistic the game gets, the scarier it gets to imagine what would happen if you plug such an ai into some fighter jets or autonomous tanks.