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The Awful Prospect of Turning War Over to Machines
"Once in a while, everything about the world changes at once. This is one of those times."
This is a quote from social commentator Chuck Klosterman that I saw atop Chapter 11 in the important and disturbing book "Wired for War" by P.W. Singer. If you doubt the accuracy of the observation, all you have to do is read the book and you'll see there is no denying it. Modern warfare is moving at warp speed to a future where robots and robotic systems do most of the fighting on battlefields. We get a hint of it every time a news story mentions that X number of "insurgents" were killed somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan by missiles fired from an American drone aircraft. We are in the midst of the most astounding revolution in the waging of war since the creation of the atom bomb. 
The U.S. Air Force now trains more drone pilots than it does pilots for manned aircraft. Airmen leave their homes stateside, drive to work, monitor video from Predator drones circling the skies over Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, and sometimes let loose Hellfire missiles that obliterate people thousands of miles from their consoles. Mr. Singer is an expert on military matters. His previous books reported the details on the rise of private military firms and on the widespread use of child soldiers in modern wars. This one is the result of four years of intense research and interviews with scientists, military experts, science fiction writers, ethicists, inventors and other people involved in or pondering the phenomenon of machines replacing people on the killing fields. The questions this breakthrough raises are many and profoundly important.
Western militaries are notoriously casualty-averse in the 21st century. When President Bill Clinton decided to bomb Serbia 10 years ago, he ordered that our incredibly expensive bombers and fighter-bombers not fly lower than 15,000 feet over their targets. The result was a ridiculously low level of accuracy in the bombing, but not a single airman was lost, and that was goal number one. Since then, the science of robotics and its use in war has exploded to the point where fewer soldiers, Marines and airmen are being exposed to lethality on or above battlefields.
It's tempting to say that this is an unalloyed blessing, but it really isn't. Reading Mr. Singer, you'll come to understand the questions and dilemmas that arise from having this technology to employ. For example, it will make wars easier for politicians to start and - while saving lives - will almost certainly lower the moral and psychological barriers to killing. The so-called "warrior ethos," by which fighting men are defined, will be eroded. There is the possibility of Terminator-like scenarios with robots rebelling against humans, and if you think that's ridiculous, just read the book. Also, technology knows no borders. Other nations, notably Japan and China, are well advanced in robotics, and down the road there is always the chance that nonstate actors, or even determined, Timothy McVeigh-like characters, will be able to deploy machines, sowing destruction for their own malign purposes.
Finally, as for the public and unmanned wars, as Mr. Singer puts it, "Wars, even the best of them, lose their virtue. They instead become like playing God from afar, just with unmanned weapons substituting for thunderbolts." Already, YouTube viewers flock to videos showing vehicles and people blown up by IEDs, or "insurgents" vaporized from on high. War is hideous, and when it is reduced to a spectator sport, something viewed from the comfort of your home or office, with machines doing the killing, it becomes much too easy a thing.
Near the book's end, Mr. Singer quotes cultural historian Paul Fussell, a World War II combat veteran, saying, "If there is no risk, no cost, then it isn't war as we think of it. If you are going to have a war, you've got to involve people and their bodies. There's no other way."
"In the end, he laments, "People will support the next war because the TV tells them to."
Machines are getting smarter all the time. People? Not so much so. As Einstein said, "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
- Posted in
30 Comments so far
Show AllIt's a Brave New World run by cowards.
"The so-called "warrior ethos," by which fighting men are defined, will be eroded." These aren't warriors in any sense of the word. They are girly boys and girls and definitely cowards playing video games. Remember the 300. Those were warriors. These cowards would just as soon turn their weapons on the American population as any one else. The word Bravery does not fit into the New World Order.
we must pull the global plug...
global start date: september 22, 2012...let's get those gardens growing...
Robots and robotic warriors will likely be most used in the class war. This is what I have worried about since I was an AI grad student long ago and why I left the program I was in.
Hmmm...I can see remote controlled robots soon being used in the US for riot control, or against peacefull demonstrators...will the machines have badge numbers?
In war...already the US is using drones. When the tables are turned on America, I can already hear the cries of: "those cowardly insurgents...launching grizzly attacks from behind the safety of their laptops!"
Your comment about being morally compelled to leave your field of study doesn't surprise some of us here. I had to decide on another field of study when I couldn't stomach the caliber of most persons I saw entering the medical professions post graduate fields and that I would be forced into cooperating with while continuing my studies. It was all about the money for most and ethics were something to lie one's way around, about, over or under, certainly not principles to guide one's behavior. The most unethical actors I saw on campus 27-30 years ago were (surprise) business majors and MD's.
The advent of this new technology makes it imperitive that we eliminate imperialism forever. A kinder, gentler world is what the right lied about giving the world during little Bush's term, but with this technology even the right must begin to try to foster a world of peace, love and understanding.
These occupations are already being fought by machines from Mr. O'robot right on down to the Blackwater zombies and the other unthinking overwrought manikin-killers which pose as military men and women--they no longer think or question their orders--theirs is but to do or die for they have been totally brainwashed by their puppet masters who have been programed by the devil himself. May God have mercy on the ones they torment.
"We have met the enemy and it is us." (Pogo Possum)
Is this the slippery slope to "Terminators"???? We are sowing the seeds of our own destruction, and the evil rich think that they will always be the ones in control. What fools they are with minds poisoned by greed.
What fools they are with minds poisoned by greed.
Yep. The elite corporatists, as a group, appear to be choosing a very dangerous path. I guess they are bored.
My money is on the environment as the shock and terminator, not robots.
yes, the race is on...will the environment force changes that abort the vast majority of human technological planning before it can be implemented, or will technology advance faster than life declines, and the last few years on this dying world belong to the computerized drone?
either way, without pretty damn quick changes in our industrial behavior, the future of the planet looks to be similarly bad...
how we will spend the remaining time would be the question: we could plant a bunch of pot, get naked and high, sing and dance and have sex, or we could fire at, and wound and kill, one another, locally or remotely, ad nauseum...
Sioux Rose
DUBET: I vote for naked and high (too).
I can answer this question easily.
The robot age is already apon us. We just dont know it yet because they have not yet been used against us here in the USA. It is too late for peak oil or climate change to stop this.
Mini robot tanks the size of laptops were used extensively in Faluja, Iraq, and continue to be used in Afghanistan in grater numbers. They can enter buildings, and are more lethal than an armed soldier. Insect sized robots are currently in use, and they will become more common. Drone aircraft are being manufactured in greater and greater numbers.
Before succumbing to despair over this technological development, it might help to remind ourselves of the power of human beings to resist being pushed around. The more that the US (or any other high tech nation) relies on robotic killing machines, the more the victims on the ground and their survivors will hate and refuse to cooperate with their oppressors. The big brains at the Pentagon call this "asymmetrical warfare," meaning that they have sticks and we have bazookas. But unless the goal of the US in places like Afghanistan is genocide, there is no way these weapons will help us "win." Of course, they will cost hundreds of thousands of lives while we in the developed world go about our lives unscathed - except for a rare terrorist attack.
Mr. Smith makes an excellent point by reminding us of Clinton's decision, which went over very well at the time, to just kill Serbs, many of them civilians, rather than risk the life of a single American. This followed on Bush I's massacre of Iraqi conscripts in their trenches or fleeing Kuwait, while risking few American lives. Obama unfortunately seems willing to build on these homicidal precedents, and must be called out on this at every opportunity. Just because he's good on domestic issues is no reason to give him a pass on policies which inevitably lead to the murder of civilians.
Our nuclear arsenal of 10,000 warheads, 20 years after the Cold War ended, IS an arsenal of genocide. Power-mad rulers, whether American, Russian, Chinese, British, French, or any other, never see human beings. They only see expendable obstacles, "speed bumps", on their way to goals they define as vital.
That is the essence of a genocidal mentality, and it is certainly NOT limited to Nazi Germans living between 1933 and 1945.
See U.S. Nuclear War Planning for a Hundred Holocausts by Daniel Ellsberg on September 13, 2009 http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/us-nuclear-war-planning-for-a-hundred-holocausts
The U.S. PLANNED to kill 600 million people, if necessary.
Valatius,
While I agree with your assessment of human feistiness in the face of overwhelming odds, I must take exception to you giving the current US gov't the benefit of doubt in its motives. There overwhelming example of any US policy enacted against an enemy has been overtly about genocide. OK, maybe not the Germans and Italians of WWII. Of course in Afghanistan,etc, the Pentagon is carrying out a continuation of its long tradition of eliminating any and all human obstacles to its objective of world imperium. It's only called NWO. It's the same old same old that the risk taking NWO of George and Ben and Thomas and Samuel and John and Alexander oligarchs wanted to pay off by throwing off the monopoly of the British East India Company. If you don't believe me, look how the final charter got set up: women, enslaved African Americans, non-freeholding persons, Natives didn't figure to get in the way of the spoils.
It is certainly unsettling to think that the brain inside my 2015 solar robot powered mower has the dual usage of flying a bomber.
I used to think war was about territory and resources. I'm not so sure now. Could it be that war, like many of our games and spectator sports, is really a tool to keep us from thinking rationaly? Is it a device to make us a party to brutality so that we never espouse an attitude of respect towards the earth and the life upon it?
I don't know but like the actor in Jurrasic Park said, "Nature will find a way". Humans are clever rascals. They are excellent actors, too. Sometimes I think I'm losing it. I'm sure some here would celebrate. The ones that care would not. To those good people I say, be well. To the others I say, repent.
But still can't win the war after eight barren years.
That's another thing I was just thinking about the other day too.
Eight years, of war ravages on a country still reeling from the Soviet war on them.
For some reason, I get an image of constantly slapping someone, hitting them, and telling them at the same time to "calm down! dammit!".
How many wars have lasted eight years in modern times? and NEVER has the ratio between sides been this lopsided. The number of soldiers killed compared to innocent civilian loss is terrible. It is SAFER to be a soldier in a modern war than to be a civilian. At the same time, it is a volunteer army. Which means it doesn't touch all of us.
War has become "not-so-bad" in the general populaces minds. The military, and the weapons manufacturers learned well from Vietnam. Vietnam affected pretty much everyone, and put the horror of war in perspective as far as to what it really meant. Now, it's suddenly "easy". War is the worst thing mankind can do. Google the definition of a "just war" (I forget what it is called, but it was tenets written by religious leaders identifying when a war was "just" and some of the conditions were surprising..
One thing breifly mentioned here by jlocke123 but that needs to be noted...
1) Actually "manning" drones from stateside, legitimizes terror. Just as you constantly heard about terrorists "hiding among the populace" as an excuse for civilian casualties, that no longer holds water. In fact, it was a ridiculous argument to start with. Of course they do, they ARE in the theatre of war, and aren't about to meet superior forces head on. It isn't "right" it just is how people are in war. But if the ACTUAL person that pushes a button and kills someone from your side, is sitting comfortably in another country and has no personal risk...connect the dots. when that person ALSO kills innocent civilians by nature of missiles in a populated area...suddenly the morality gets pretty sticky.
Is then that command center a legitimate target? Don't even think of the "war on terror" but a more conventional war between two nations. It is literally bringing the war home.
2) it most certainly WILL be used stateside also. And the more they get, and more techniques they use, there is a very real chance the military will one day turn on the citizens of the US. Power baby...it's irrestistable to the powers that be to hold onto it.
Already, just last week a SHERRIF in San Diego deployed (as far as I know didn't use it though) one of the sound-cannons for possible use if demonstrators got out of hand.
Even the "non-lethal" weapons are going to crush democracy. And they are not right. We need a draft, if something is worth going to war for, if it is needed, then ALL should sacrifice. We have now war as business, and they think PR.
Sick..
Robotic War can only succeed in nations whose "Robotic War Ability" is mired in Dark Age technology such as shooting at drones with a WW1 rifle. Consider China or Russia. Would anyone believe that these nations could not invent and develop weapons that offset the drones for example? They probably already have. New aggressive weapons have always engendered the development of defensive weapons.
I watched a video on YouTube of a drone attack on a wedding in Afghanistan. It was stomach churning. Couple these drones and robots with surveillance technology of video and satellite and one realizes that we are on the cusp of seeing tyranny that is unparalleled in human history. As it stands today, these weapons and tools are in the hands of corporate fascists and their quislings. People who show no compunction when forcing their will on the poor and downtrodden in their quest for money and power. While these tools are used abroad today, I have no doubt that these tools could be turned against the American people if the need arises. As I said before, this could well make Nazi Germany look like a walk in the park.
Isn't war itself an "awful prospect?"
It's not just robo-weapons turned against "them" that we have to worry about. It's the merger of the global technocrats with their own technology -- the Transhuman Elite -- that we have to worry about. Once they start doing that we all become "them." Here, check out "Silicon Valley: A Brief Tour of the Global Technopolis" at:
http://www.sillyconvalley.net/siliconvalley/toursiliconvalley.html
when the drone "pilots" (do they really call them that?) sit at their computers in Nevada, and watch their drones fly over Afghanistan and release their bombs or missiles what's it like? If asked to do so would they slash the throats of the same women and children? i don't think so.
the usans willingness to massacre these people depends upon keeping a similar distance from their victims. i don't know what's in those videos, but i doubt very much they show the kind of mayhem and misery you can find at RAWA or Voices or any number of other websites.
somehow the citizens must be made to understand the magnitude of the war crimes they are supporting.
Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses (September 2000), entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Decent article on an important topic; just that Ron Smith screwed it up with a couple of things he said. F.e., there's NO point in saying, "It's tempting to say that this is an unalloyed blessing, but it really isn't". It's a duh thing to say! There's also nothing wrong with viewing footage of bombings, people killed, destruction from war, etcetera; if psychopaths enjoy these scenes, then a lot of the rest of us don't, but without seeing what wars actually do, people are more easily going to remain insensitive, say, about wars and will therefore support them as has been commonly done, so far. Seeing the hell that war is and brings should serve to help WAKE people up. Psychopaths like to eat at McDonald's, but not everyone who eats there is a psychopath. Finally, the book sounds like a good one to read, and Einstein said an intelligent thing, although not everyone who uses technology, regardless of how advanced it is, does so with any harmful outcomes. The problem is that we have too many psychopaths running our governments, military forces, law enforcement forces, etcetera; yet it's The People who elect their political representatives, and many of these voters [are] sociopaths, at best.
this is copied from a report by Jane Adas (of CodePink NY) on an automated killing machine (aka 'unmanned guard tower'---wish the photo could copy in here) being used in Israel against Palestinians:
Khuza’a is a farming village in the south, east of Khan Younis and very near the border with Israel. On Jan. 10, during the third week of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces launched a three-day assault on the village, beginning with aerial bombardment. On the third day tanks and bulldozers invaded at midnight. Here, too, they demolished more than 100 homes and much farmland. Islamic University student Shatha Abu Rijela described fire everywhere from the initial phosphorous bombs, “like a huge animal trying to eat us.” People ran screaming from their homes, not knowing where to go. A neighbor showed us a piece of phosphorous outside her house. When exposed to the air and scratched with a stick—even after four and a half months—it still smoked and ignited.
But troubles in Khuza’a didn’t begin or end with Operation Cast Lead. Three years ago Israelis killed Shatha’s uncle when he was working in his field, and took her father prisoner. The family has been allowed no visits, letters, or phone calls in that whole time. And since the cease-fire, Israeli gunfire has killed two people and injured seven. During its assault, the Israeli military erected several unmanned guard towers that resemble huge gold-topped mushrooms and are operated by remote control, like a computer game. One morning, a neighbor of Shatha told us, the tower opened like a flower and shot all four of his sheep.
insect sized robots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CM-H3rRkxQ