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February 16, 2005
Not Your Asimov's Robots
The robo-soldier is coming, we're informed:
The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has."They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."
The robot soldier is coming.
The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.
...
Pentagon officials and military contractors say the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous missions as possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting American bodies in battle.
"Anyone who's a decision maker doesn't want American lives at risk," Mr. Brooks said. "It's the same question as, Should soldiers be given body armor? It's a moral issue. And cost comes in."
The article goes on to argue that the robot would be cheaper than a human soldier, etc. etc. About how robots don't need pensions, disability pay, health insurance...
But you know the real issue. Robots do not need to be recruited, nor do they have mothers and fathers who may show up at Pentagon's doorsteps when their child gets killed. They won't vote. They will not come back and talk about what they did and what they saw. Most important of all, they will not do what Camilo Mejia has just finished serving a jail sentence for, become a conscientious objector. "By putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being," Mejia says in his essay titled "Regaining My Humanity."
The sad irony is that robots were first extensively imagined in the fiction of Isaac Asimov, who chose to create them with "the three laws," the first of which stated that "a robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
Posted by zeynep at February 16, 2005 11:53 PM
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Comments
Yeah. The level of hypocrisy they can maintain always amazes me.
Posted by: Zeynep at February 17, 2005 09:35 AM
Uh... so how are they going to teach a Robot Soldier to obey the Geneva Conventions?
Oh... wait, silly me. We're getting rid of those.
Posted by: saurabh at February 17, 2005 06:03 PM