Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic."Armed robots will all be snipers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation. They will not need bonuses to enlist or housing for their families or expensive training ranges or retirement payments. Commanders will order them onto battlefields that would mean certain death for humans, knowing that the worst to come is a trip to the shop for repairs. The writing of condolence letters would become a lost art.
First off, Pike needs to turn off the Terminator 2: Judgement Day DVD and think before he writes an article that is basically a summary of the movie, except reality. What's the plot of T2? A scientist develops a better microchip that leads to the super-assassin Terminator robots, who kill with precision and without mercy? Isn't that what Pike just surmised was reality? Perhaps I should write an oped piece about a giant grasshopper shaped space vessel that is on it's way to earth and will release 36 giant saucers that are 15-miles in diameter that will strategically position themselves over major cities and use our satellite system against us to coordinate their attack. Then we'll fight back by planting a virus in their computer systems to lower their shields, and a rogue, alcoholic fighter pilot (who looks like Randy Quaid) will destroy one of their ships by flying an F-18 up its kazoo.
But seriously, here's my real problem with this future-death-robot scenario: If we can make robots that are hyper-precise shooters, and can run into gun-battles without hesitation and fear, why not program them to disarm the enemy? If they can shoot an enemy dead with computer precision, surely they could also shoot the enemy's hand off so they can't fire back? Doesn't it make more sense to incapacitate your enemy, rather than kill them? From a psychological standpoint, forcing the surrender of your enemy, rather than killing them, is better for you and worse for your enemy. The enemy army cannot easily rally behind the image of a martyr if you instead have that person rotting in a jail, and your troops will not feel the effects of possible psychological damage associated with killing another human being.
There is, of course, the future scenario where our hyper-precise death-robots battle our enemy's hyper-precise death-robots, in which case, may the best robot live and the other die. But if we are to use our armed robots as a replacement for the combat infantryman in battles against other humans, it makes ethical and logical sense to program them to super-effectively injure, disarm and capture, not to kill.
_
0 Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen