Woes with technology go all the way back to the start of history. Somehow, somewhere, something will go wrong. For me, it was about 2005 when various gadgets started rebelling against me - dramatically and occassionally, violently. The first instance was with a fax machine at work. One day, just like any other, I tried to send a fax through to a company that was waiting on some paperwork. A curious thing happened. The machine turned beserker.
It growled noisily, and then began to drag itself down the desk towards me. Internal things were making strange grunting and grinding sounds, and it began to vomit half digested paper in my general direction. If this wasn't perturbing enough, it began to scream "PRINT LOAD ERROR!" at as loud as possible, which was fairly loud. I was transfied with horror as a part plastic, part metal behemoth rolled down the desk towards me, cutting me off from the door. Dozens of lights blinked off and on across its glistening plastic carapace, and the paper it was firing had begun to bounce off my jacket. It was at that moment I realised that I was probably going to die, the victim of some terrifying industrial accident. Swallowed by a mechanical monster.
Then the power-cable reached its full length, jerked once, and then came loose. The nightmare ended. I left quickly and without offering an explaination as to why the office was so messy.
Since then, such things have become almost tedious. A fan heater exploded on me once, showering my frozen feet with white-hot sparks. My microwave is of a category so high that it does not appear on cooking instructions. It does not cook food - it destroys it. The computer in my room, a veteran of five years service, growls menacingly for long periods of time, but never quite manages to overheat itself. It just scares me. I'm pretty sure it murdered the printer, which died after just two months, but not before mashing an entire 3,000 word double-spaced essay into an incomprehensible mass of ink and screwed up paper. Things finally came to a head a few weeks ago when we installed the new washing machine, and it proceeded to charge across the kitchen shaking uncontrollably and making noises not entirely of this world. I'd be convinced it was after me if it hadn't have veered off at the last moment to have a go at the fridge, which is probably the most placid electrical item I own.
Don't get me wrong, technology on the whole is great. But as things are getting more and more advanced, it seems that sometimes we need reminding of boundaries. Boundaries like this. This is a battlefield robot, what people might take to be a bomb-disposal robot were it not for the fact that it has a machine gun on top of it capable of firing 300 rounds a minute. Sure, it does bomb disposal. Lets not argue about putting people's lives in jeapordy diffusing IED's, but it does really need a gun now, does it? The same is even more true of Predator-drones, which can be used for survellience and reconnaisance, but are also quite handy at blowing things up. Weddings for example.
BBC news puts the figure (as of July) at a deathtoll of more than 700 since 2009. For those people who still really like Obama, it is worth noting who is authorizing such strikes. It has been noted by political analyists that this is quite clever for Obama, since it avoids some messy legal blackholes and associated troubles like water-boarding, indefiniate detention and rendition by *just* killing someone, instead of bothering to arrest them.
Alright, so battlefield technology is a big thing. It generally gives you a decent advantage. And a remote controlled robot is a little bit different from proper artifical intelligence, but it still has a role to play on what could be quite a slippery slope. By removing the soldier from immediate danger, and transferring everything down a video link, it can de-humanise enemies and enviroments more effectively than any amount of military training. Think about the Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq, where to the public - if not the combatant - Baghdad was reduced from a city of millions of people to an errie alien landscape, everything tinged with green nightvision. Completely deserted. It wasn't a city, a society or a concentration of people. It became a thing.
Jonathan Hari wrote a fantastic article on the problems of replacing flesh and blood with lead and steel "warbots". I've selected some of his best bits to summarise the mood.
"...evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong – because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 per cent of US factories have "major robotics accidents" every year – a man having molten aluminium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren't designed to kill.
Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine-gun pointed at your chest."
"You can't appeal to a robot for mercy; you can't activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, says: "War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians.... If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes"
"If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them". "
There is a lot more that could be written about this, but I think I've wrote enough, and time is running out. I encourage everyone to read Hari's article, and have a good long think about what sort of a future we want to build. Is it one where you can give the power of life and death to a pre-programmed machine?
As for me, I'm going to head home. I think the toaster is conspiring.
As a couple of asides:
First, this might seem a bit sensationalist, I suppose. So here's a bone. If it is sensationalism you want, look no further than The Daily Mail Song. A fantastic work by a guy called Dan. Whoever he is.
Second, if anyone seems to think that by not advocating soulless killing machines, I'm pretty much in favour of conventional warfare as a generally acceptable idea, then no. Just to clear that up.
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