Robots: Threat, Menace, or Both?

The author of this "AmeriKKKan military power will solve all the big problems of the world!" piece seems to be pro-robot. We can use robots to stop genocide, he implies, because no AmeriKKKans will be harmed in the production of the film. Taking oil, worth the expenditure of AmeriKKKan lives. Saving lives, not worth the oil, let alone the lives.

Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic." Let us dwell on "unsympathetic." These killers will be utterly without remorse or pity when confronting the enemy. That's something new. In 1947, military historian S.L.A. Marshall published "Men Against Fire," which documented the fundamental difference between real soldiers and movie soldiers: Most real soldiers will not shoot at the enemy. Most won't even discharge their weapons, and most of the rest do no more than spray bullets in the enemy's general direction. These findings remain controversial, but the hundreds of thousands of bullets expended in Iraq for every enemy combatant killed suggests that it's not too far off the mark. Only a few troops, perhaps 1 percent, will actually direct aimed fire at the enemy with the intent to kill. These troops are treasured, and set apart, and called snipers. Armed robots will all be snipers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. They will not need bonuses to enlist or housing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments. Commanders will order them onto battlefields that would mean certain death for humans, knowing that the worst to come is a trip to the shop for repairs. The writing of condolence letters would become a lost art.

Sound good? No more Darfurs? No more acting out of colonialism & capitalism at their finest? Not bloody likely. We'd suggest these robot soldiers will increase genocide, police actions, etc. No, we don't think the robots will gain self-awareness, go mad, & start killing humans. Imagine, however, the ease w/ which a general sitting in his nicely furnished Pentagon office can type a few lines into the "Death to You Name 'Em" app on his iPhone, & have the "stone-cold robot killers" march into a picket line & put the UAW in its place forever, to mention but one of the almost infinite possibilities for totalitarian repression. Even w/ a "professional" military, as opposed to draftees, it might be hard to get personnel to slaughter on a wholesale basis. "Cool unsympathetic intellects" that will follow any orders in the hands of cool unsympathetic killers who might give any orders is not this American's idea of a "robotic American peace."