As I mentioned in the last entry, I saw some stories last week that I wanted to comment on. This is the second one of them. I’m going to ignore the rest as we’re getting on to next week
Anyway, I saw an article in the New York Times last week about the U.S. Army seeing robots in the future of war. I won’t summarize the article here, but I want to ask the question: Is this line of research a good idea or not?
On the plus side, military research has led to advancements in civilian technology and advances in robotics have the potential for significant advances in civilian life. Robotics certainly is a field that would be highly useful in civilian life and is an area that could use some more development. Unfortunately, the machines described in the article appear to be more like more like remote-controlled toys than autonomous robots, requiring a human operator, so unfortunately they won’t advance robotics as much as I would like to see.
One negative that I see about this initiative is that it doesn’t reduce manpower requirements, so the extra machinery would increase the U.S. Army’s budget, and therefore U.S. taxes. Or will it? Perhaps these robots will result in fewer soldier deaths. This would have the obvious personal benefits of fewer dead soldiers as well as the associated financial benefits.
I think that there is a more significant danger. Will the operators controlling robots on the front line (something not explicitly discussed in the article, but which is an obvious conclusion to the development of this technology) have the same respect for human life as they would if they themselves were on the front line? Will they be able to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions? Think of the book Ender’s Game