Interesting article on the hastening introduction of armed 'robots' on the battlefield. The phenomenon is more advanced in the air and at sea. On land the technical challenges are much greater and the ethical dilemmas of allowing the autonomous use of deadly force vastly more prevalent. Strictly speaking with the exception of the South Korean device which may have a degree of autonomy none of these are real robots--they all have human operators. But that would seem unlikely to remain the case for long. As it says in the article:
The Pentagon also wants to give the robots more freedom, arguing that the only way to enhance the fighting power of US troops is to enable a soldier to use several unmanned systems at the same time. This is only possible if the machines are allowed to make many of their decisions independently.Can't fault the Pentagon's logic. As so often these days I find reality is catching up with ideas explored in science fiction . In this case the Bolo novels by Keith Laumer are very relevant. The interesting thing, to me anyway, is not how the technology will impact the battlefield per se; rather it is how we will think of war when we start to share the battlefield with robots. On the one hand you have the potential for remorseless inhuman killing machines. On the other hand you have 'soldiers' whose emotional reaction to being insulted, attacked, or frightened would be nil; they wouldn't suffer psychological strain of combat and while they certainly could commit atrocities as human soldiers sometimes do why would they? In fact as the clever thing about the Bolo novels is that they explore how these huge fightng machines become progressively more sentient they actually seem to understand concepts such as duty and honour better than the humans around them.
As we come to the last weeks of summer break wind down to the start of the new school year I recommend adding a Bolo book to your summer reading.
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