Wired for War

"In terms of science fiction becoming real, this book just blows you away – because it really has already become real. Wired for War goes through all the effects of having automated weapons on the battlefield, stuff that’s already happened and stuff that’s likely to happen, and also different ways to think about how to proceed. Do you allow machines to kill people? Do you have a human being who is like an executioner, who pushes the button and takes responsibility for the machine killing people? Should machines only kill other machines? What’s the psychological effect on a populace when they’re being hunted by machines and they never actually see their enemy? Does it scare them? Or does it empower them because they see that their enemy is too scared to come and fight them face to face? These are all really fascinating questions and we’ve seen all this stuff explored in science fiction, again and again. But now you have this opportunity to see how this is affecting our real world, and it’s a much more grave and sombre and serious thing to consider, because it’s not as simple. Real life never is. So I think it is just an amazing contribution to people’s conception and understanding of how robots can be used as weapons, because that is a major use of robotics, to save people’s lives and sometimes to do that by taking people’s lives. It’s an incredible topic to examine and he really hits it from every angle. It’s filled with examples of futuristic technology. For instance, surveillance is huge. You need to know where things are at – so you can send a machine into a dangerous place to put an eye on something. You think, ‘Yes, I’ve seen that, they use these big goofy robots: I’ve seen The Hurt Locker .’ But the fact is that those are just baby steps towards the ultimate goal of having a completely appropriate machine for whatever environment you’re facing. As it turns out, pretty much every environment on earth has some animal that’s evolved to operate there – perfectly, optimally, totally efficiently. So there are mobile landmines that locomote the same way that crabs do, for being dropped offshore and crawling up under the waves towards the shore. There are snake-like robots that can really change their gait and slither through forest, wrap around a tree, roll their body up the tree and then aim a camera at something. Yes, I had one climb up my leg over at Carnegie Mellon. It’s pretty creepy, but also fascinating. If you look at machines, traditionally people think of them as robotic, which means they move awkwardly. But if you look at an animal it moves very gracefully. I think what we perceive as grace is actually just the beauty of an animal that’s perfectly evolved – there is something amazing about watching a deer bound over a fence. And as machines get more and more developed and advanced, they move less robotically and they start to move smoothly and with natural grace. Have you noticed that the United States Army is actually pushing that? When you say surreal, what you mean is ‘like in a video game’. And the US Army is all about that. If you see their latest round of commercials, it looks exactly like a video game. There’s a crazy unmanned vehicle shooting around the sky and troops with night vision goggles and dropping out of planes. And at the end it says, ‘This is not a video game, this is real – join the Army.’ That’s a great question and not a simple one to answer. It’s something that Singer really examines from a lot of angles, because even if it’s true that it’s not the best way to win over hearts and minds, there’s still a trade-off because you’re putting fewer American soldiers at risk. It’s a really complicated question, and it’s really interesting to get a serious hold on the part that technology plays, instead of examining science fiction scenarios – because all the science fiction is really happening now. The vast majority of the technology that’s applicable in a military setting is applicable in a home setting. Exoskeletons help soldiers run, but they also help elderly people stand up, they help nurses transfer patients from wheelchairs to beds without hurting themselves. The vast majority of research in robotics is also peaceful. I don’t want to give the impression that there are a lot of bloodthirsty roboticists out there. Yes, the da Vinci robot performs minimally invasive surgery. The doctor controls it through tele-presence, so the doctor doesn’t even have to be near the machine, although typically he is. It has levels of precision that a human could never approximate. So do you want your doctor, with his big, greasy, human hands inside your body in order to perform some incredibly delicate surgery? Or would you rather have a pencil thin, slender, robotic manipulator slip into your body through a hole that you could poke with a pen, and do the surgery and leave – and you heal up twice as fast? Robots are capable of operating outside of human boundaries. We humans are bound by our senses, by our embodiment – the size of our bodies, the level of precision we can get out of our hands. Robots aren’t. A robot can react much faster than a human being. That’s why there’s an artificial intelligence algorithm inside your anti-lock brake system that’s making decisions on the fly about how much braking pressure to apply. Human beings don’t even push the brakes or the gas on a car anymore. We just push a button that tells the car to do it, because we’re not that good at it. In little ways robots are creeping into our lives, in lots of places we don’t even notice, in order to do things better, faster, stronger. I don’t think any sector of the robotics industry has grown faster or more successfully than industrial robots. Robot arms comprise the majority of that industry. In the past you had these gigantic arms that were rotely obeying their instructions and if, God forbid, you stepped in front of one of these guys, it would arc weld your face, just as soon as it would arc weld the side of the car. Now what’s happened is that these manipulators are getting more and more people friendly, they’re getting smarter. They’re starting to get sensors so they can see what they’re doing, they can make some decisions about how to do what they’re doing. They’re not just these blind slave arms that are just going about replaying the same commands again and again. So even the robot arms are getting smarter. And the fact is that none of the products we have would cost what they cost if there weren’t these factories filled with robots. There’s no human being that can assemble a hard drive. No human being can assemble an iPod, much less all the components that go into the iPod. All the stuff that we own has robot fingerprints all over it, whether you know it or not – whether it came from China or whether it’s domestic. I’ve also noticed that robot arms seem to star in car commercials quite a bit, which is massively ironic because the first robot arm was invented by an American, who went to sell it to General Motors. GM agreed to try it out but in secret because they were afraid that being associated with robots – which at the time were most popular in sci-fi serials, where they showed up and stole the damsel – would be bad for their corporate image. Yes, absolutely – and that’s because that’s where it began, that’s where the whole industry began with Joe Engleberger and his partner. Absolutely, there’s no mass-produced electronic product that is hand-assembled. That would just be crazy."

"This is less upbeat. The Singer book is about robots. In 2004 there were 150 robots being used in Iraq. By 2008 there were 12,000. They do relatively benign things like de-mining and dismantling explosives but they also kill people. There is “The Predator” – an unmanned vehicle that hovers over an enemy for up to 90 hours before they decide whether to kill them or not. And it’s operated from Nevada. So there are these guys going into work every morning and watching enemies in northern Pakistan. And they boast that with Predator attacks they’ve killed 20 out of 40 of Al-Qaida’s leaders. They say it’s the West’s answer to suicide bombers. No, I don’t think it is. They often kill civilians, but in any case it makes people furious. They say the West is cowardly. It enrages people. You could hover there and send the police in to make an arrest instead. Killing them remotely like this alienates everyone and it’s horrendous, I think. Yes, I think so. War is supposed to be a struggle between human beings. If you risk your own life to do it and you don’t have the impunity of doing it from Nevada, you can think more carefully before you act. There’s this little thing Boeing has developed that you throw into the air and you can see what’s happening over the wall or over the hill. You use an XBox to control it, so these boys grow up playing computer games and they carry on playing them. It’s alarming if you think about the future of war. I do agree with Smith that there has been a fundamental change in the nature of warfare. I don’t know if you can even call it war any more. The warring parties, who are usually not armies but a mixture of regular and irregular groups, avoid battle and control people by killing or displacing them, and by committing atrocities. Though they often claim to be doing this for some cause, it is very often linked to crime. For the Afghans it’s drug crime, in Bosnia it was looting and pillaging. It’s a way of making money. They say the crime is funding the violence, but often political violence provides a cover for crime. What you see is a mixture of war, human rights violations and crime. Perhaps you’d only call it war if it’s violence about political causes. I think war is an anachronism. It’s in huge decline. There was a bit of a hike in the early 1990s but since then the UN has been starting to learn how to manage conflicts. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Where once there were regular armed forces and the Clausewitzian model with the justification of St Augustine, there are now wars funded by crime, not by taxes. Battles are rare and the main victims are civilians. So I think that we in the West need to completely change the way we do security – it needs to involve a mixture of police, the military, development experts, people who can establish a rule of law and a normal functioning society. I call this “human security”. In this new kind of war, in which civilians are the main victims, we need to establish a rule of law. What I mean by a rule of law is a society where people relate to each other non-violently. This is how my approach, a human security approach, could help to end wars."