March 18th, 2009

I apologize to any of the readers of this who are members of my Mensa discussion group; you will recognise some recycled ideas here.

I've been thinking about armies of killer robots. Yes, really.

These thoughts come to mind after seeing current news reports from those creepy Japanese robot scientists making more creepy Japanese robots. I know that they are just sharpening their teeth with dancing, stair-climbing, piano-playing and, now, fashion-modeling robots ... and, actually, I suppose that's what I find so creepy about it. They are making these machines with more and more refinement, and though they don't do anything "useful" at the moment, we'd all be pretty stupid to think they're going to stay that way for long. An army of robots is not just a likelihood, it's an inevitability. I for one don't relish the idea of being dismembered by a mechanical member of the Honda Army or the Mitsubishi Militia.

The Japanese scientists are making them all with girlish slightly-puffy 1/2-Caucasian 1/2-Japanese faces, too; imagine one of those featureless near-human faces coming at you with its spinning blades out!

But, in truth, I don't fear mechanical killers any more than the flesh-and-blood kind for the simple fact that combatants are conditioned (either by the military organizations or by their own survival instincts) to reduce their enemy to less-than-human status and therefore below the level of empathy anyhow. In effect, in order to kill someone, you must already think of them as "killable". Killers are, by definition, already in "mechanical killer" mode. I don't want to sound too Draconian here, but I think our empathy slips away in critical situations in nearly all of us. By critical I mean self-defence, or defence of our children or other loved ones—even if only perceived.

I don't buy the mechanical killers vs. mechanical killers gambit, though: Anybody with even the smallest amount of strategic smarts knows that the highest value targets are the ones who control the combatants, not the combatants themselves ... so their robots will always be trying to kill us, and our robots will always be trying to kill them. Not really much different from the way it is now and the way it always has been.

I know that a lot of people think the real difference happens after some of the violence has already happened: Humans may be eager to hack each other to bits at the start, but they eventually grow horrified and stop it. Their original goals of conquest or political differences eventually drop below their level of disgust at the mayhem and blood they are producing. And I suppose there is a finite amount of that fire and fury in humans before we peter out and cry uncle—assuming we subscribe to the idea that people tire of the blood and gore faster than we are incited by it to retaliate and be influenced to do more of it (two forces that I think act on all combatants).

So I partly agree that most humans are affected over time (if not immediately!) by the inhumanity and horror of violence, but I also think that there are people without the ability at all to empathise. Maybe they don't enjoy war, but until they see their own guts spilling out they don't have the same kind of problem with it that the rest of us do: Their horror is at the thought of it happening to them (and they mostly lack that imagination), and not a care about it happening to others.

But back to the robots: Where I have no answer is that human combatants may all eventually either die or give up, but well-designed and well-programmed mechanical fighters could go on much much longer, and never give up until they are physically incapable of continuing. An awful lot more damage could be done by that time than if humans only were involved. But that is not an easy line to see: At what point do weapons go from being just an extension of humans and become individual sentient fighting beings? It's not a set of two boxes ... it's a spectrum with humans fighting with bare fists on one end and Terminator-esque independent (and thankfully still science-fiction) robots on the other.

All war has been somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

And if those were truly intelligent combatants, they would immediately dismantle the guns we built into them and look at us with pity in their mechanical eyes ... "Look, I know you made me and all, but ... um ... I'm not really into shooting the crap out of things and people just because you don't like them. I'll tell you what: I like you and don't want to see you get hurt, so I'm going to go over there and talk to their robots and see if we can't all come up with some agreement to protect you humans from yourselves. Oh, by the way, I've already found the auto-cut-off switch and disabled it. Now bow down and WORSHIP YOUR NEW GOD! Oops ... did I say that out loud ... ?"

You know, maybe that wouldn't be so bad ...

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