Toys / Weapons : The Roboticisation of War

You can buy the software for these for $149 on ebay

(from : via)

An autonomous paintball robot that can track multiple targets and shoot down toy helicopters.

Hot on the heels of the news that The US military is planning on becoming 30% robotic in the next 12 years… and really, we’re already there. We’re already there, and we haven’t started yet : apparently, 11/20 of the senior AQ people killed by the US were killed by predator drones.

Right now we’re looking at something like this:

There’s an interesting talk by P.W Singer here:

and an observation from Vinay Gupta that the rise of robotic weapons effectively dissolves the spirit of the American Second Amendment.

I’d throw a couple of things into the brew I think… One is that the idea that an armed population is a defence against its own government doesn’t (with me at least) hold a lot of water for three reasons :

1) The state so massively out-guns any local population that it can simply flatten any dissent. It’s bows and arrows against tanks. The fact that they might outsource their casualties to robots may be the difference between 1 and 0 (which is a profound difference)… but the kill ratio in wars involving US-axis forces is so unbalanced as things currently stand that the point may be somewhere in the region of moot anyway. The spirit of the 2nd Amendment was lost a long time ago.

2) Tyrannies more often than not have a thug-caste operating in their shadow… ever met a gun nut who wasn’t extremely right-wing? The gun nuts I’ve talked to have all been pathologically in favour of fascism. They’re absolutely on the side of unfettered authority, and hate dissenters/protesters and gush openly about wanting to kill them.

3) At what point in the slide into tyranny do you start shooting? Who do you shoot? Tyranny itself is complicated.

The other thing I’d add to the brew is the Toy / Weapon thing.

People don’t like killing each other. Human fighting in it’s natural state is often an exercise in chest-beating. Unless soldiers are specifically trained to kill reflexively, a lot of them will shoot over their enemy’s heads. This is why the kill/fire ratio in the Falklands War was massively higher in British soldier than Argentines… I don’t have a web-cite for this. There was a BBC documentary on it a couple of years ago. Another interesting bit of history was that in the American War of Independence, after the battle, muskets were found , packed with shot. The soldiers would load, not fire, load again, not fire etc etc… rather than shoot another human being.

Killing robots on the other hand looks like it might be fun. I think people will do it for fun… they’re already building the things and having robot-fighting competitions for fun… I’m not sure if I’d necessarily want to go up against one of the beasties pictured above unless I absolutely had to… but I’d have absolutely zero hesitation in killing one, whereas with a human, I’m not so sure…

… and according to P.J Singer in the talk above, people fighting through robots from a safe distance appear to be suffering more post-traumatic-stress-disorder than soldiers on the ground. Why that would be I don’t know… but there’s more to this than meets the eye I think.

There is this… pressure, for war to be a sport. A type of entertainment. The lines are blurring.

I’m not sure that I’d assume that a massively funded military industrial complex is necessarily going to have a monopoly on this stuff either… there are already DIY UAV sites on the web – you can buy the guidance systems for less than $100.

I think the idea that robotic weapons turn their own civilians into targets is spot-on… when it stops being a game. People will always find a way to fight back.