The Billiken's Bluff

Sports Illustrated used to run a section where they featured a ridiculous quotation, or highlighted some improbable, yet true occurrence in the world of sports, or in the world at large. So in keeping with that spirit...

The US has contracted a firm named iRobot to develop robotic soldiers that will eventually take the place of human soldiers in combat missions.

A few things to consider while reading this NY Times article...

1. Does anyone at the Pentagon realize that the firm, iRobot, developing these robotic soldiers shares its name with this past summer’s blockbuster film starring Will Smith in which, GASP*!%#!@!!!!, robots designed to make life easier went haywire and started killing humans. Does The Department of Defense have a Public Relations division? Does anyone in this PR wing find this coincidence problematic, uncouth, unwise, or at the very least ironic? Hmm..?????? Anyone??? Anyone!?!?!

2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, i.e., is Phillip Dick smiling somewhere, or is he rolling over in his grave? This is exactly what happened in Dick's short story called Second Variety. Robotic soldiers are developed to take the place of humans in combat missions. The robots turn out to be lethal killing machines, so lethal in fact, that they wipe out nearly all life on the planet. The last 10 humans remaining on earth are forced to scramble into a rocket and attempt an escape to the darkside of the moon. I'm tempted to do my patriotic duty and mail Donald Rumsfeld my copy of Dick’s anthology.

3. Is Donald Rumsfeld the first prototype of the above mentioned robot? Something we might want to explore further.

4. Am I actually reading phrases like, “As the first lethal robots head for Iraq,” in a newspaper? in the year 2005?

5. Or reading quotations like, "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson.

6. Or finally, “A prototype, about four feet high, with a Cyclops eye and a gun for a right arm, stood in a workshop at the center recently. It readied, aimed and fired at a Pepsi can, performing the basic tasks of hunting and killing.”

This all a bit unreal.



The article in today’s NY Times is rather lengthy article so here are some excerpts from it:

-"They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

-The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war.

And before you dismiss this as something that won’t come to fruition in your lifetime; the first generation of armed bomb-disposing robots will be sent to Baghdad this April.

-All these are in the works, but not yet in battle. Already, however, several hundred robots are digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, scouring caves in Afghanistan and serving as armed sentries at weapons depots. By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by a soldier with a laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill enemies.

-"The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it."

Thankfully, not everyone is so sure that stocking our army full of robot soldiers is a good idea. Apparently, Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems has seen a few science fiction films and remembers the equation: Artificial Intelligence + Heavy Artillery = Bad News for Human Beings.

-Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a leap of faith in technology not everyone is ready to make. Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has worried aloud that 21st-century robotics and nanotechnology may become "so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses."

-"As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them," Mr. Joy wrote recently in Wired magazine. "Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control."

-Mr. Everett and his colleagues are inventing military robots for future battles. The hardest thing of all, robot designers say, is to build a soldier that looks and acts human, like the "I, Robot" model imagined by Isaac Asimov and featured in the recent movie of the same name. Still, Mr. Everett's personal goal is to create "an android-like robot that can go out with a solider to do a lot of human-like tasks that soldiers are doing now."



-The technology still runs ahead of robot rules of engagement. "There is a lag between technology and doctrine," said Mr. Finkelstein of Robotic Technology, who has been in the military robotics field for 28 years. "If you could invade other countries bloodlessly, would this lead to a greater temptation to invade?"