Future War

Here's a bit from a NY Times article about robots and war:

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

“Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs” as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach’s camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.

This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.

But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers — and even some human rights advocates.

The world continues to get more complicated and humans are struggling to adapt and handle the complexity. The funny thing is that we will probably have to rely more and more on machines (computers) to understand the problems that our machines (robots) can potentially cause us.

The world is getting more "interesting" all the time:

Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design “ethical” robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.

I find the idea of an "ethical" robot quite funny. It is right up there with a "conscious" robot and a robot "in love". Just how do you shrink wrap something indissolubly human and stuff it into a machine? You don't. Machines will be intelligent and do very interesting things, but they won't be humans, they won't be ethical, they won't be conscious, and they won't love.

If you thought living through the Cold War with the key technology being a progression of nuclear weapons and platforms for their deployment, just wait for the fun of living through the era of military robots!