{"id":8086,"date":"2019-09-08T23:25:05","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T06:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8086"},"modified":"2019-09-10T06:52:35","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T13:52:35","slug":"issue-of-the-week-57","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8086","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill<\/em>, The Atlantic, September 3, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Twenty-eight years ago as we write, the movie theaters were packing them in for the most expensive movie ever made at that point.<\/p>\n

Terminator 2: Judgement Day.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Terminator 2 imagines things you wouldn’t even be likely to dream”, Mike LaSalle wrote in his review for the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/p>\n

An AI, robotic, computer determined nuclear apocalypse was barely averted (or was it, given the scripts in ongoing sequels with the latest upcoming?)<\/p>\n

Countless books, movies, TV and streaming provider series have covered similar ground.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the dream come true, or the nightmare.<\/p>\n

An\u00a0article in The Atlantic<\/em> last Tuesday titled, “Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill”,\u00a0is a revelation, potentially right out of the Book of Revelations.<\/p>\n

The subtitle is:<\/p>\n

Tomorrow\u2019s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.<\/em><\/p>\n

The article references the blunt talk from an air force general of the “Terminator conundrum,”\u00a0<\/em>the question of how to grapple with the arrival of machines that are capable of deciding to kill on their own.<\/em><\/p>\n

Consider this excerpt from the final paragraph of the article:<\/p>\n

In the Terminator movies\u2019 dark portrayal, an artificially intelligent military system called SkyNet decides to wipe out humanity. . .But \u201cour job is to make sure the robots don\u2019t kill us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So was SkyNet’s.<\/p>\n

There’s so much news going on at a thousand miles per second that this most-read article for part of the day last Tuesday was just that.<\/p>\n

But this is much, much bigger than news of the day.<\/p>\n

It is one of a handful of stories of science-fiction become reality that will completely alter life on earth, and given the probable expansion into space, throughout the universe (where who knows what other science-fiction encounters await.)<\/p>\n

The power of the article is not as much in the unnerving observations above, as in what informs them–the mind-exploding, straightforward, objective journalistic details, of the story most people have no clue about.<\/p>\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n

“Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill”<\/a><\/p>\n

Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Center For Public Integrity, Sep 3, 2019<\/p>\n

Tomorrow\u2019s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Wallops island<\/span>\u2014a remote, marshy spit of land along the eastern shore of Virginia, near a famed national refuge for horses\u2014is mostly known as a launch site for government and private rockets. But it also makes for a perfect, quiet spot to test a revolutionary weapons technology.<\/p>\n

If a fishing vessel had steamed past the area last October, the crew might have glimpsed half a dozen or so 35-foot-long inflatable boats darting through the shallows, and thought little of it. But if crew members had looked closer, they would have seen that no one was aboard: The engine throttle levers were shifting up and down as if controlled by ghosts. The boats were using high-tech gear to sense their surroundings, communicate with one another, and automatically position themselves so, in theory, .50-caliber machine guns that can be strapped to their bows could fire a steady stream of bullets to protect troops landing on a beach.<\/p>\n

The secretive effort\u2014part of a Marine Corps program called Sea Mob\u2014was meant to demonstrate that vessels equipped with cutting-edge technology could soon undertake lethal assaults without a direct human hand at the helm. It was successful: Sources familiar with the test described it as a major milestone in the development of a new wave of artificially intelligent weapons systems soon to make their way to the battlefield.<\/p>\n

Lethal, largely autonomous weaponry isn\u2019t entirely new: A handful of such systems have been deployed for decades, though only in limited, defensive roles, such as shooting down missiles hurtling toward ships. But with the development of AI-infused systems, the military is now on the verge of fielding machines capable of going on the offensive, picking out targets and taking lethal action without direct human input.<\/p>\n

So far, U.S. military officials haven\u2019t given machines full control, and they say there are no firm plans to do so. Many officers\u2014schooled for years in the importance of controlling the battlefield\u2014remain deeply skeptical about handing such authority to a robot. Critics, both inside and outside of the military, worry about not being able to predict or understand decisions made by artificially intelligent machines, about computer instructions that are badly written or hacked, and about machines somehow straying outside the parameters created by their inventors. Some also argue that allowing weapons to decide to kill violates the ethical and legal norms governing the use of force on the battlefield since the horrors of World War II.But if the drawbacks of using artificially intelligent war machines are obvious, so are the advantages. Humans generally take about a quarter of a second to react to something we see\u2014think of a batter deciding whether to swing at a baseball pitch. But now machines we\u2019ve created have surpassed us, at least in processing speed. Earlier this year, for example, researchers at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, focused a computer network on a data set of 1.2 million images; the computer then tried to identify all the pictured objects in just 90 seconds, or 0.000075 seconds an image.<\/p>\n

The outcome wasn\u2019t perfect, or even close: At that incredible speed, the system identified objects correctly only 58 percent of the time, a rate that would be catastrophic on a battlefield. Nevertheless, the fact that machines can act, and react, much more quickly than we can is becoming more relevant as the pace of war speeds up. In the next decade, missiles will fly near the Earth at a mile per second, too fast for humans to make crucial defensive decisions on their own. Drones will attack in self-directed swarms, and specialized computers will assault one another at the speed of light. Humans might create the weapons and give them initial instructions, but after that, many military officials predict, they\u2019ll only be in the way.\u201cThe problem is that when you\u2019re dealing [with war] at machine speed, at what point is the human an impediment?\u201d Robert Work, who served as the Pentagon\u2019s No. 2 official in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said in an interview. \u201cThere\u2019s no way a human can keep up, so you\u2019ve got to delegate to machines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

Every branch of the U.S. military is currently seeking ways to do just that\u2014to harness gargantuan leaps in image recognition and data processing for the purpose of creating a faster, more precise, less human kind of warfare.<\/p>\n

The Navy is experimenting with a 135-ton ship named the Sea Hunter that could patrol the oceans without a crew, looking for submarines it could one day attack directly. In a test, the ship has already sailed the 2,500 miles from Hawaii to California on its own, although without any weapons.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/picture>
John F. Williams \/ Released<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n