Yay! The Mojave Robot Race.
This is so much fun! It's so exciting! Wow, the people building these robots are smart.
"The so-called Grand Challenge race is part of the Pentagon's effort to cut the risk of casualties by
fulfilling a congressional mandate to have a third of all military ground vehicles unmanned by 2015."
[emphasis added]
Gee, what's wrong with this picture? You know, sometimes these days, I get a little bit tired and sad.
The issue here isn't whether using robots to fight a war is wrong, you see? That's something
that can be argued either way. But what's clear, when you think about it, is that we are choosing
to emphasize and foster this idea with our public money, and sponsoring our finest technical minds
to work on fascinating problems, under the condition that the point of it all is better warfighting
machines.
Yes, I'm aware of the mine-clearing bots. Those are nice and fine, and perhaps they do reduce
some casualties, and OK, good. That's not my point, here though. Maybe autonomous logistical
support is a smart thing to develop in terms of reducing our casualties, OK, I can believe that,
although I think there's a flawed premise regarding our need to conduct lots of wars in the future.
It's also true that there will be many positive peaceful spinoffs from this technology, perhaps even
more than military ones, as has often been the case in the past. Maybe killer automatons will never
even be built or used, perhaps all that results from this big robot race is that it improves
the open-desert mobility of the inevitable frenchMaidroids we are currently somehow struggling
through our daily lives without. Thank goodness we have the Nintendo Dogs, huh?
But you see, we can grant all that as true, and yet it's still also true that we are explicitly choosing as
a society to sponsor research into ways of conducting war with less involvement of our troops.
Presumably not less involvement of the enemy's troops, though. Wait, are we giving them robots, too?
Well, in the sense of ushering in an age, perhaps we are. Innovation is not very tractable in terms
of thermodynamic reversalibity, we know that much from Canot's "Le sac des chats" theorem.
And we certainly justify any comparable efforts to build XYZ in China or anywhere else when we
build XYZ, don't we? Is that just too boring and obvious to point out? I'm sorry. I think it needs to
be said ABOUT A MILLION TIMES, until the public gets it. Heavy sigh.
But very quickly, back to the notion of the enemy's troops being killed by our robots. Maybe it
will never happen. Even if it does, maybe it's not really a fundamental change in warfare; what's the
line between an "intelligent" heat-seeking missile and an "intelligent" battlefield killing robot? Maybe
not an important one philosophically.
But if it were to happen, what would be the net outcome? I think it would basically mean "we can
kill the enemy a little more easily now, so war is a little easier for us." Now, what's the impact
of that message at home, and what's the impact on the mindset our potential adversaries?
I think there's definitely more than one answer to the latter, and it's important to consider
the knowns and unknowns here.
Then we must ask ourselves point-blank: is research into the development of battlefield robots a
world-peace-and-stability-enhancing or a world-peace-and-stability-degrading activity? Remember,
I'm not saying "killer robots" are the only or even a probable outcome of the research. Those answers
aren't fully knowable, are they? They depend on lots of decisions not yet made. My point is that
developing the potential for autonomous battlefield vehicles is the nominal goal of the
research, and that's what we do know, dig? Bottom line: The fact that we accept military labelling of
so much of our nation's and colleague's R&D work means that we as engineers are ultimately
operating under an outdated sense of social responsibility, collectively.
If we all just clap and let everyone say "wow, those robots are neeto, I wonder what kind of X...",
we are blowing it. The world is not our 9th grade science fair.
More on DARPA , libertarianism, Iranian Space Pogram below
