‘Terminator’ Inspires Real Military Robots — And Terrorists Can Build Their Own!
You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000 dollars,” says Peter Singer, author of the new book Wired for War.
He warns that ultimately robot warfare may even expand beyond the military, and besides 43 countries now working on military robots, there’s “non-state actors ranging from Hezbollah to this militia group in Arizona to a bunch of college kids at Swarthmore … One person’s hobby — such as the hobbyist who flew a homemade drone from North America to Great Britain — can be another person’s terrorist strike option.”
But one of the most fascinating insights is how ‘Terminator’ fed the growth of real war robots “One scientist talked about how the military came to him and said, ‘Oh, we’d like you to design the hunter-killer drone from the Terminator movies’…. [I]f it’s effective for SkyNet, their thinking is: “Well, it could be really neat in our real-world battlefields.”
And yes, there are now more autonomous and intelligent robots where the human role is more “managerial or supervisory”, according to the author. For example, he describes the Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar System as looking “a little bit like R2-D2 if R2-D2 had a 20 millimeter machine gun cannon mounted on him,” which executes the split-second responses to incoming missiles without human authorization or interference. And the Global Hawk, which replaces the U-2 spy planes, can “take off on its own; fly 3,000 miles on its own; carry out its mission on its own; turn around and fly itself back 3,000 miles on its own, and land itself. So it’s not so much being piloted as it’s being supervised or managed.”
He argues the ultimate challenge is programming human morality into a robot. Beyond complex ethical questions about terrorists using Red Cross ambulances, even simpler operations need to be wired into robots. “It will see an 80-year-old grandmother in her wheelchair in the very same way it sees a T-80 tank. They’re both just 0s and 1s in the programming language.”
