Robotics and Unmanned Systems: New ‘Automated’ Technologies for America’s Imperial Wars
in a previous article, we discussed the ethical, and the legal dilemma, of the roll-out of artificial intelligence through the next generations of drones in the US and Israeli unmanned fleets.
The world is changing, and rapidly. The ‘experts’ are having difficulty adjusting to both technological advances, as well as social advances where societies are beginning to discard the concept, albeit rejecting altogether – the entire premise modern imperial warfare. Still, the out-dated institutions plough ahead with budgeted programs on anything and everything, traditional as well as newly advanced killing machines…
While the US is weighed down spending fortunes on military industrial pork and other old technologies, it is also burning through its checkbook in R & D and acquisitions of newer applications – all in order to keep ahead of the Chinese Jones’s. According to the Brookings Institute, key emerging technologies in the US military field include:
“new energy systems, such as lasers; new hardware, such as robots and unmanned systems; new manufacturing techniques, including 3-D printing; and new software dealing with cyberwarfare and cybersecurity.”
But Washington militarist ‘think tanks’ like Brookings are also pushing US military brass towards unmanned, but more “autonomous” technologies:“while present U.S. acquisition focuses on large, often expensive systems designed to directly reproduce how a human would do a task, a more robot-centric or autonomous approach may lead to a different set of design criteria.”
One WP reader issued the stark warning which needs to be discussed now, before AI and robotics dominate our militarised societies. The reality of Cylon and Terminator technologies are here already:
“Robotics might be the future of war but it could also lead to major losses on the battlefield when the enemy invents the counter to it and turns the robots on it’s masters. if you are developing robots you had better be prepared for the hackers who can and will hack the links to those robotic platforms and either disable them nulling your force multiplier. or turning them against you in essence giving them a force multiplier.”
No kidding. And we can hardly afford any of it…
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