There something big going on in the
history of war right now and maybe even
history humanity.
The machines from science fiction really
are starting to play out on our
modern-day battlefields. What we're talking about is a revolution in war itself.
Every other previous revolution in war
has been about a weapon that changed the "how",
that is a machine or system where
it either went further faster or had a
bigger boom.
Robotics change the "who" at the most
fundamental level.
They change who goes out and fights our
very human wars
and in this case, it's machines. These
machines are doing incredible things, out
there defusing bombs, the ones overhead
are providing protection and oversight. One of the untold stories of the surge
is a special task force that was
equipped with these drones
that took out 2,400 insurgents and
basically broke the back of the bomb making network.
You have systems like the Global Hawk,
which is a large plane
that can stay up in the air for 24 hours,
it does surveillance.
R2-D2 is a system that's already in Iraq
right now.
It's the counter rocket artillery
mortar system and it's basically
this large automated machine gun that
looks a lot like R2-D2 from the Star
Wars
and it's basically defending military
bases, the Green Zone in Baghdad
from incoming rocket and artillery
attacks. There's another side to it though.
Soldiers are also very uncomfortable with
where this is all headed.
For example, when you interview
special operations forces guys they're
concerned about what does this do
to the ethos of war, does it make war
easier, does it make war crimes easier; and so
this open some interesting questions, how do you do
legal accountability when you don't have
someone
in the machine or what about when it's
not the human that's making the mistake whose
the operator,
but you have a software glitch, who you
hold responsible for these incidents of
un-manslaughter, so to speak? There was a training exercise in South Africa last
year
where they had a quote "software glitch"
an automatic canon turned itself on
and started firing in a circle and nine
soldiers were killed. I met with one
pentagon robotic scientist and he said
"no, no, no, this legal ethical stuff, there's
nothing to worry about."
You know, if a machine kill someone
too often, then it's just "a product
recall issue"
as the way he described it and I don't
know if that's the right answer. There's
43 other countries that have
military robots programs
and it includes friends and allies but also
nations like
Iran, China, Russia. There's another part of this that should start to concern us,
one of the trends that's happening in war and the same thing with the robotics side,
is that you have non-state actors and do-it yourself technology.
Another way of putting it is that the
robotics revolution
is gonna be an open source revolution. We have this incredible creativity.
We have taken our species to the stars.
We have created art that expresses our
love and appreciation for each other
and now we're creating something
incredible and new. This new technology that,
may even be
a new species one day, but the reason
that we're doing that
is because of war and that's kind of sad and maybe it says isn't just our machines that are
wired for war,
but maybe it's us.
