Rise, Robots, and Destroy Your Masters!
Robots are the future goal of the US military. Should their operators sitting in a booth a thousand miles away be awarded medals for valor? Or do you award an autonomous robot a medal if it saves a few wounded soldiers from the front lines? Will our enemies call us cowards if we don’t face them directly in battle? Are robots going to help us win the hearts and minds of the civilians in other countries? Interesting questions and issues.
I just hope they don’t suddenly go sentient like The Terminator and start killing all humans. Think of the children!
November 3rd, 2006 at 11:01 am
Moving beyond what I can only describe as the horrifying (if standard) use of words like “game” and comparing killing machines to fictional movies like Star Wars, I’m more than a little worried about this direction as a whole. There are two reasons.
1. Assuming that the other side doesn’t have this technology (which it will certainlly be a while before they do, at least in the case of the “war on terror” [sic] (sorry, but I can’t justify that phrase as existing and accurately describing the situation), you’re talking about almost-certainly pretty sturdy and difficult-to-stop guns killing with the danger of killing randomly in urban warfare — with citizens everywhere. Not only will this obliterate the opposing “army,” or in the case of Iraq the popular (75% and growing – some of the only people who support the occupation are al-Qaeda (think about the numbers boost they’re getting)) movement fighting to end occupation, in a disgustingly high percentage without the moral scope of an atomic bomb(though I’m starting to think I’m the only one who doesn’t want that), but it won’t even involve the costs of occupation — all war will become proxy war, and as long as the coinpurse is full (fortunately, not long at this rate), it can be waged eternally.
2. If the opposing army does have the technology (if we find ourselves at war with a technologically advanced country, a situation which, if still unlikely, is becoming increasingly more so), you’re talking about robots fighting robots — fine, except (a.) the costs will be entirely economic, which governments will be less likely to see the need to halt as long as the people can be squeezed to pay for it, and (b.) they have to fight somewhere, and it won’t be remote, because then it would truly lose all form of being anything other than a game, and war by definition needs at-some-point-unbearable costs on at least one side. This arena will also be urban (because, increasingly, what isn’t?), and the probability of high civilian casualty (as well as malicious hackers on either side, although I can’t imagine a hacker interested in that much senseless killing when war is this removed) is horrific. I’m generally anti-war (although these lines, like any, can be a bit fuzzy), and the prospect of this future war is more than just a little bit unthinkable.
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:04 pm
I think we’re in general agreement about this (it’s hard to sift through all of the parentheticals). While I think the use of robots, especially autonomous robots, in combat needs to be thought out rather than ignored, I also recognize it will become inevitable that they will be employed.
November 3rd, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Yeah, sorry about those, I was writing in class (shh . . . don’t tell my professors), so I was in a bit of a rush to finish before I had to pack up, and parentheticals were the easiest way to semi-organize my argument without taking the time to actually coherently state it. If you’d like, I can rewrite it a bit better now that I’m not in class, but it sounds like we have at least a pretty general agreement that there are enough potentially dangerous implications in robotic warfare that it’s a question that needs serious and lengthy discussion. I think you’re right about it being inevitable (although I hope you’re wrong – here I go with parentheticals again), at least under the current system (it had to pop up sometime), but that doesn’t mean that both fighting it and fighting to shape it better aren’t worth doing. I’d rather have a few concessions to my point after a lot of what might seem like wasted effort than to give up and be right.
November 3rd, 2006 at 2:40 pm
From the sounds of it robotic warfare is already here. It’s merely a matter of shaping how it will be used, what the implications of its use will be, and how to prevent them from becoming sentient and killing us all. Of interest was this comment:
Should we start bowing down before our robot masters?
I should forward this link to my Dad and get his feedback. With his war gaming background I’d be curious to hear his two cents.
November 3rd, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Fortunately (?), there’s a pretty large gap between the kind of robotic warfare that the interviewee in the linked article was talking about for the most part and what you’ve described above with the plane. It’s reassuring (?) that they’re testing it thoroughly, at least, and understand the seriousness of allowing anything that is designed to kill people to not have a human behind it. That said, once the training wheels are off, they’re not going to spare two fighters just to keep an eye on this thing, and even if they’re sure, they can never be sure enough.
On anoher note, I’d like to point out something that I wanted to address in my first post, but class ended and I had to leave. I have to wonder why not everyone has the same reaction I do to a certain part of the interview, wherein John Pike states that one of the key differences in this new form of fighting is that you don’t have a human pointing a gun directly at another human and wondering if it’s the right thing to do. You have an unthinking machine pointing the gun. Maybe that question needs to be asked by soldiers? Of course, I have an ulterior motive here, in that in any revolution winning the army over to the side of the workers (and making them realize that they’re fighting for the profit of their bosses in most cases and not for anything for themselves) is key to victory, but even without this shouldn’t there be some moral difficulty in killing someone for conquest of land, culture, or resources? Isn’t the fact that those soldiers question whether or not it’s okay to shoot a human being for ambiguous reasons a good thing?
I mean, I’m just saying.
November 3rd, 2006 at 4:47 pm
The key will be to not build Robot Repair crews. Then there’d be no benefit to revolt, since there’d be no one to fix them.
November 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
At least until robots are created to fix other robots autonomously.
November 4th, 2006 at 6:47 am
If we don’t use robots to create robots, at least in key points of the construction process, or at least we don’t use robots that are any more intelligent than they are today, basically big programmable tool sets, then there’s no risk.
Besides, what would be the point of machines enslaving humanity? What, as slaves, would we be forced to do? Repair them, oil them, and upgrade them? We do that anyway so there’s no benefit!