I have always been a science fiction fan. As a child I read fascinating stories of space exploration and of unimaginable worlds a billion light years away. A lot of what I read remains beyond imagination at this time and will perhaps always be beyond the realms of what is possible for humans to ever see.

What is striking is how much of what was science fiction is now science fact. Think back to when you first saw Star Trek and how remarkable the idea that you could communicate with people thousands of miles away with a tiny hand held communicator. This was from a time before the mobile cell phone had appeared and even before we had wireless phones in the home.

The first time I saw someone using a mobile phone outdoors I felt the need to stand and watch, it was such an amazing thing to see. Now mobile communication is so commonplace we have people twittering from the train, from their foreign travels and even from the International Space Station. The world has changed.

One of the great but terrifying themes of science fiction was of a type of robot killer machine gone mad. Maybe gone mad is inaccurate. The truth is that computers do what they are programmed to do so a robot that goes on a killing spree is only doing what it was told to do. Programming has always been as much art as it is science and occasional glitches in the coding lead to unexpected consequences and this an accepted fact among most programmers. You cannot build 100% reliable code as there may always be some certain set of circumstance that cause the software to react unexpectedly in a situation that was not expected or planned for.

The growth in computer powered robot war machines has been remarkable in the last decade. When the Iraq war began there were no robot war machines involved. Seven years on there are said to be around 12,000. The current crop of machines are usually controlled directly via a satellite link from somewhere miles, sometimes thousands of miles, away from the scene of the action. How much easier it must leave your conscience feeling if all you do is go to work and kill a blip on a screen. It turns the dirty reality of killing human beings into the carefree world of the computer game. Killing images on a screen is easy and not having to see fear and death in another man’s eyes makes it much easier to kill more people without worrying since all you killed was a blip of light on a screen.

The potential risk to mankind and human morals of these fly by wire drones is one thing but the next stage of development promises something even more troubling.

Apparently there is a problem with the bad guys, which presumably means someone you don’t agree with, trying to interfere with your plans of wreaking death and destruction on them and their families. It appears they have had some success with interfering with the signals used to control the pilotleess drones and reduced the effectiveness of the weapon platform so the next stage is the semi autonomous machine that can make it’s own judgment calls and attack what it sees as a target.

If you are looking for a tank it may be reasonably easy to identify it but how do you select between a shepherd carrying a large stick and a terrorist carrying a gun? The potential risk of picking either the wrong man as a target or simply choosing both to be on the safe side is very worrying if you have any plans to be a shepherd or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

War has become a very political issue and wars are, it seems, won or lost on the basis of the number of body bags returning home. People are less willing to simply accept the political arguments for war and feel they should have more say in when wars take place and why. No longer do we just accept the huge numbers of dead we saw daily in the First World War. It is unthinkable now that thousands of young men could be killed every single day for years. It did happen back then and the war of attrition only ended when both sides had wasted a whole generation of young men.

The new developments in robot war machines could solve that problem with autonomous robot warriors sent into the field to kill anything that moves. No longer would politicians have to face up to the risk that they could be sending their young men and women into jeopardy. No longer would they have to convince their troops they were fighting for a just cause. Simply send in the robot soldiers and let them wreak havoc on the chosen opposition.

We all want to avoid the loss of life that wars cause. Nobody in their right mind wants our soldiers to die but neither should we be too quick to decide that other people with alternative views and attitudes should die either. An army of robot warriors allows for the possibility that wars could be started and decided on purely financial grounds with little fear of the consequences at home. It seems like a dangerous place to be if the wrong people get into power and have command of such an army.

Once you have people with that sort of power what would you do to stop them if they decided to wage war on their home country? Revolution is rather more difficult when you need to convince your troops you are doing the right thing. If you had an army of robot soldiers at your command you would need to convince no-one. Just push a button and revolution would begin. Dictatorship at the press of a button would be very appealing to some people who feel they know better than the ordinary voter what is right or wrong.

We all want to have the military with the best chance of winning a war. It has always been that way. The country, or person, with the most powerful weapons and army usually seems to win. It is what took us from using sticks and stones to fight with on to having modern aircraft, tanks and nuclear bombs. It’s great to have an advantage but what will happen if everybody has an army of super robot warriors? How would we decide on the winner of a war between robot armies and what would stop the winning robot warriors simply marching all the way to the enemy’s capital city and wiping every living person off the face of the planet?

What would happen if the robots decided that fighting each other was pointless since the cause of the problem was actually the humans who had sent them into battle? It’s a scenario rather reminiscent of the film Terminator and it is starting to display signs of possible science present rather than science fiction. Those who develop such technologies will assure us this could never happen but they would say that wouldn’t they? How can they be so sure? We are not talking about dumb robots here. We are talking about robots programmed to make a judgment and make life or death decisions for themselves. They would certainly need to communicate with each other to decide if another robot was friend or foe so maybe they would just decide robots were friends and the humans were the enemy.

How would you deal with the prospect of a robot warrior walking up your garden path and telling you that in the name of efficiency and to avoid the risk of what you might do in the future, you and your family were about to be slaughtered?

Yes, it is a little far fetched and yes we all want to avoid our military personnel being put in harms way but this robot can of worms is not something we can avoid thinking about because it is inconvenient.

The reason people try very hard to avoid wars is to avoid loss of life but developing self regulating and somewhat self aware robot war machines could just possibly lead to either a greater risk to democracy or the end of human life as we know it. Have a great day, while you can.

Related posts:

1. Prepare For The Worst With Disaster Planning Get A Portable Home Generator We all hope it will never happen to us...
2. Boring F1 Race In Bahrain So after all the build up to what was...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.