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

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

"This is a clear step towards one of the main goals of the Future Combat System's project of making a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack," Sharkey says of the Multi-Robot Pursuit System. "Force multiplication of this sort can only be achieved through group robot autonomy. It is also another slide down the ramp toward autonomous fighting weapons. Independently, ground and aerial robots have been tested together, and once the bits are joined, there will be a robot force under command of a single soldier with potentially dire consequences for innocents around the corner." 

Or benefits for innocents, the Pentagon might argue. Using robots saves lives, goes the aphorism. Of course, that argument could easily be rejoined by the military's current record on murdering innocents in wartime: So far, the occupation of Iraq has erased hundreds of thousands of civilians off the face of the Earth at an economic cost running into the trillions, with no victory defined and no end in sight. In fact, when it comes to war, the United States is a money pit. Just like the Multi-Robot Pursuit System. 

"I suspect that these contracts in the short term may not come to much," cautions the ACLU's Stanley. "But taxpayer money is best spent on research and education. That's the best long-term investment in our nation's future, broader than these narrow military purposes. This is not to say that technological advances can't be useful, and there certainly is the potential for this project to save lives. But it's mostly military guys playing with high-tech toys, as they have been doing for decades. And robot armies are a lot scarier than the illegally wiretapped intelligence sitting on a rack in a server farm. But a robot pack's time is better spent cleaning up litter on Interstate 66. This controversy is telling us more about the present than the future." 

True enough, but sci-fi has always mutated the present and engineered the future. From cell phones and satellites to invisibility cloaks and nanotechnology, it's only a dream until it becomes a reality. And it usually becomes a reality, one way or another. So I have no problem predicting that robots will replace humans on the battlefield, and I'll join some esteemed company in doing so. Eventually, we will have to tease out our totalitarian impulses and funnel them into our mechanized progeny and let them have at it while we sit on Olympus and hope they stay down there and fight. Some of us want to know just what the hell we're going to do if they decide to come home to mommy and daddy. 

"As a means to express the darker aspects of our id, technology has worked to devastating effect," says Mark Pauline, whose robot armies from Survival Research Laboratories have literally gone to war with each other in punishing artistic spectacles. "However, it has been burdened with one serious and unresolved shortcoming: It's just too impersonal. What could be more impersonal than staring down a machine whose sole purpose is to kill you? As the engineering roadblocks to this type of interaction melt away, it will soon be impossible to say 'It was just a movie', or 'I had a strange dream.' When that happens, we will finally have created the one truly worthy bogeyman that has so far eluded us.  We will have met the enemy, and he will not be us."

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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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