Are Pentagon Nerds Developing Packs of Man-Hunting Killer Robots?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted November 20, 2008.

We have created more ways to kill and die in our heroic narratives, it seems, than to coexist and compromise. Check any of the hyperviolent installments of culturally charged phenomena like Grand Theft Auto, Hostel and Fear Factor, or just watch the rerun in Iraq, and you get the point quickly. Suddenly, armed-robot pursuit seems perfectly normal. 

"If robotics and artificial intelligence advance to this, the question will not be about technology but control being used to concentrate power," explains Jay Stanley, public education director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project. "We need to get our house in order, institutionally. The underlying problem isn't the technoogy, but this large national security establishment grabbing more power and subject to no checks and balances. The National Security Administration has something like 60,000 employees, and who is overseeing them? Congress and its staff of hundreds? We need to appoint privacy commissioniers like every other modern industrial country. During the Cold War, we built a massive security establishment;  during the War on Terror, we turned the lenses on ourselves, and it was done rapidly." 

Like the grinning, gorgeous greenhorns of Paul Verhoven's criminally underrated film adaptation of Robert Heinlein's sci-fi classic, Starship Troopers, American society has sleepwalked through an intense, expensive militarization that looks like must-see TV. The reality-television phenomenon supplanted real-world privacy invasions and covert torture, replacing the latter civil liberties violations with wide-screen automatons posing as humans in any number of soap-operatic exercises. Bradbury imagined this world in his foundational novel, Fahrenheit 451, which extrapolated television onto entire walls of mundane programming while, yes, packs of robot hounds hunted down noncooperative human subjects clinging to their books. Which is to say, their human history.  

Don't Do the Precrime If You Can't Travel Time 

"This technology may well come back into the civilian world, if required," says Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield. "A number of U.S. police forces and SWAT teams are already using robots regularly for dangerous situations, and iRobot, the makers of the military packbot, have been working with Taser International to arm the packbot for civilian use.

"Sending a pack of robots into a building for clearance would obviously be useful in some police operations. I can easily imagine them being used for policing riots or demonstrations. Who knows where it will lead with society developing so many laws under the cloak of terrorist prevention?" 

Those laws have been fearsome and abused in equal measure. Take the RNC 8, for example, mild-mannered Twin Cities political activists who were pre-emptively arrested, in Philip K. Dick "precrime" fashion, before they had a chance to protest the 2008 Republican National Convention and are now facing charges of -- what else? -- "furthering terrorism." That may sound like science fiction, but it's worse: It's an apotheosis of Minnesota's enforcement of the Patriot Act.

"Do robots have to look like sci-fi cyborgs? Or something else?" asks Arthur Kroker, who is professor of political science and director of the Pacific Center for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria.  "How about lethal hunting packs of computer-generated financial markets, configured by robo-traders, running and crashing on automatic, and taking most of the world down with them? Maybe there's nothing more dystopian than the present." 

Fighting the Future 

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Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

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