Originally this was going to be a reply to Rose of Montague’s comment on my “Raw Data Now” post:

“Dude. You’re teaching the machines to read. They’ll destroy us all!”

That was clearly in jest, but I’ve actually been fairly worried about future conflicts with machines. Seriously!
(Most of the following blog was also prompted by watching this TED talk. Warning: I re-state a lot of it.)

I do not, however, mean armed conflict with artificial minds, like the Terminator. I mean the slaughtering of noncombatants by robots controlled, at least in part, by other humans. This shouldn’t be in the least bit surprising. Humans have been using machines to kill each other for as long as they’ve been made, with the latest generation being fighter jets, helicopters and tanks. These are tools of war, and are incredibly powerful ones at that. I might even claim that these machines save lives by ending conflicts quickly and without putting their pilots in as much danger as the front lines might. That last argument is why I’m scared about the machine uprising.

In the early 20th century we predicted that robots would soon join us along with flying cars. Flying cars haven’t gotten here yet, but to a large degree robots have, they just aren’t in your living room (usually).

I find it a bit amusing, to be honest, the way Hollywood (and the game industry) seems fixated on the killer AI. While not an impossibility, the decision of an AI to kill off the only other sentient beings in contact with it seems both unlikely and quite far down the road. When the terminator shows up, he won’t be a humanoid AI with a heavy accent, he’ll be a real person controlling the equivalent of a 21st century tank — one without a driver.

Already in use for war are armed UAVs and their ground-treading counterparts, capable of killing without requiring a local pilot. DARPA is also hard at work pumping research funds into armored/robotic exoskeletons for the few humans that will need to be on the field. From medicine to reconnaissance to transport, robots undoubtedly will embed themselves in what it means for America to fight a war.

But the law of exponential growth (e.g. Moore’s law) means it won’t end there. Once we have exoskeletons, we’ll have the ability to make super-exoskeletons. Once the majority of front-line soldiers are machine it’ll become imperative that all of them are. Who needs human hands on the battlefield when metallic ones are superior? I’m not saying that battlefields will become devoid of human life, but that the roles of humans will become akin to people playing video games.

What becomes the target, in this future? What’s the point of it all? Do you aim for the factories, run by robots to make robots, or maybe the transport chains of autonomous vehicles delivering supplies to their mechanical pals. Do you aim for the HQ, and hope to track down something that could be anywhere on the planet? Do you attempt to outperform your opponent in the arms race and develop a virus or something equally devastating that lets you wipe out everything in one blow? Or do you aim for the population centers, and hope that a hostage city will force a surrender? The answer is none of the above, because modern warfare is dying alongside the newspaper industry as technology mercilessly reshapes our world.

The advance of technology has already majorly transformed the face of war twice by my count. The first was gunpowder, which destroyed the warrior caste, reshaped the fort and eventually made the idea of rigid formation laughable. The second was the atomic bomb,of which the consequences are not yet fully clear, but in my mind involve the development of proxy warfare. With proxy war comes terrorism, which I’ll define here as the unexpected killing of civilians by an organization (other than a nation) for the purposes of advancing an agenda.

If we think about how advancing robotics effects terrorism, this is where things really get ugly to me. The gift of an unmanned vehicle is that the human life of the pilot can be spared–but what if the UAV’s goal is to fly into a building? As the role of humans in war becomes that of chess players rather than pawns, it becomes largely possible for a single man to wage war. And as the fires of industry continue to burn, we’ll become increasingly more helpless to resist. The only solution will be to have no enemies or to turn to our computers to save us by hiding us away from an unseen threat that could be anywhere. It’s an awful lot like the possible future of biological weaponry. It’s an awful lot like the possible future of a black market for portable nuclear weapons.

Don’t fear the machine. Fear the maker.