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January 28, 2012 at 7:28 pm
There was a bad sci-fi-ish adventure/buddy movie called Stealth two years back that had an autonomous drone. It talked, went rogue, stole all its music off the internet, and saved the day at the end. I noticed it playing on a cable channel about a week or so ago. Haha. Anyway, one thing lacking in the Times story — and in all stories on drones — is that they’re exclusively used in places and on peoples who can’t defend themselves. Iran included. You won’t, for example, see a drone — stealthy, autonomous or otherwise — over China lest the same thing happen to it that happened to a spy plane the flew to close years ago. Increasing amounts of money on robotics technology is used on places and peoples with essentially nothing, either for themselves or in the quiver, and both. As you know, I’ve called it bombing paupers. And none of the allegedly wise people who get talked to for these kinds of things bring up this obvious matter. Instead they go on about side issues — like what if it makes a wrong killing decision, when wrong decisions are already routinely made by the people directing these things. There ain’t gonna be no Asimovian laws of robotics. So the robots become more sophisticated to be used on those left farther and farther behind, whether they’re petty bad guys or not, it hardly matters. It just matters that there be a market for it. Which makes this bit, at the LA Times, specious: “More aggressive robotry development could lead to deploying far fewer U.S. military personnel to other countries, achieving greater national security at a much lower cost and most importantly, greatly reduced casualties,” aerospace pioneer Simon Ramo, who helped develop the intercontinental ballistic missile, wrote in his new book, “Let Robots Do the Dying.”
Well, the sir force and navy — this is being tested off an aircraft carrier — aren’t doing any dying now. There’s no dying to be soaked up by robots because we’re not going against the Imperial Japanese Navy in WWII. The pirates off Somalia can’t even fight back against manned systems. So it’s all rubbish. There isn’t a conventional force that robots are going to fight which could inflict any serious casualties on the US military because those with such armed forces aren’t going to get pushed into a war with us and, further, we won’t be fighting them. This is what made much of the Stealth movie silly. The script writers, unlike our national security experts, had to at least try to get something on the screen that seemed slightly real. They failed but, hey, they gave it a shot. Our theoreticians don’t even make the pretense of trying.