Danger, Will Robinson!

The Economist offers up this borderline-hysterical article about robots in war. It's mostly what you'd expect, ("Robots with guns. We're all gonna DIIIEEE!!"), but there's an interesting snippet:

Today’s drones, blimps, unmanned boats and reconnaissance robots collect and transmit so much data...that Western countries now practise “warfare by committee”. Government lawyers and others in operation rooms monitor video feeds from robots to call off strikes that are illegal or would “look bad on CNN”,

Note that when I say "interesting" in this context, I actually mean "send all the lawyers to Antarctica and light them on fire."

That's just what we need: lawyers deciding when to attack the enemy. Hey, I know! Let's just take a vote among potential targets and see if they think we should attack them today, shall we? Maybe we could form a focus group to decide what color the missiles should be, lest we offend someone who is chromatically challenged. It's not nice to offend handicapped people before blowing them up, you know.

Then there's this:

Pressure will grow for armies to automate their robots if only so machines can shoot before being shot, says Jürgen Altmann of the Technical University of Dortmund, in Germany, and a founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, an advocacy group.

That's right: an advocacy group already exists. We've barely begun to develop robotic warfare and a pack of stinkin' hippies are already whining about it.

Oh, I get it, folks; I'm not stupid. I understand that if we build robots that not only are absent Asimov's Laws but actually run counter to them, there'll be thorny issues and maybe even an occasional rogue. I'm not saying we should build an army of robots and tell them to go kill everybody that's Not Us. It's the implied undercurrent here that bothers me; that there are so many people who are willing to leap up and tell us how horrible this all is, without offering a solution. Because the "solution" is to go backwards and put more of our people in harm's way.

The only thing in war of which you can be absolutely certain is that there will always be another war. We are apes; we fight. We will fight with our fists or with sticks or with death-ray shooting robots, but we will always fight. Only a blinkered hippie would think otherwise. Simply seeking to ban autonomous robots will serve no purpose but to handicap us in a fight with those who refuse to do so.

If you look closely at an original 1903 Springfield rifle, as issued to the U.S. military in 1905, you'll note that there's a little switch next to the magazine well. This is the magazine cut-off switch. When in the active (default) position, the weapon will not load from the integral five-round magazine. You have to feed rounds into the breech one at a time, just like its predecessor.

"But... that's retarded," I hear you say. Yes, it is. But do you know why it's there? Because a bunch of dipshits in Washington (uniformed and otherwise) decided that if the average soldier was given a weapon with which he could fire five rounds in less than 10 seconds (gasp!) he'd become ineffective and lose fire discipline. So they instituted a kluge fix. Do I have to tell you what happened the first time our troops ran into an enemy who were shooting at them using rifles that were fed directly from a magazine?

You cannot stuff genies back into bottles. All the ethical hand-wringing in the world won't change the fact that combat robots are here to stay. And you can bet your deuce gear that somebody is already developing an autonomous combat routine. The question we should be asking is not "should we do this?" but rather "is our robot smarter than their robot?" I know; that sounds like it came out of Dr Strangelove. But the question is valid, Kubrick's stick-poking at MAD aside.

Besides, if robots wipe us out and take over the world, leftist radicals will finally get their wish: no more humans! So really, autonomous combat robots are a win-win scenario for everybody.