Peter Singer and war robots
Here’s a good interview of Singer by Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman on Singer’s new book, Wired for War.
When historians look back at this period, they may conclude that we are today at the start of the greatest revolution that warfare has seen since the introduction of atomic bombs. It may be even bigger. Our new unmanned systems don’t just affect the “how” of war-fighting, but are starting to change the “who” of the fighting at the most fundamental level. That is, every previous revolution in war was about weapons that could shoot quicker, further, or had a bigger boom. That is certainly happening with robots, but it is also reshaping the identity and experience of war. Humankind is starting to lose its 5,000-year-old monopoly of the fighting war.
How might we overestimate the power of robots in war?
The robotics trend is revolutionary, but it also doesn’t change the underlying fundamentals of war (something the Rumsfeld-era network-centric folks never got). The fog of war remains. While you may have Moore’s Law, you can’t get rid of Murphy’s Law. The enemy has a vote, so while your technology may be amazing, people will rapidly make adjustments and develop their own counters.
Singer was asked what might occur if Americans didn’t have to see body bags coming home…
Robotics thus take certain trends already in play in our democracy to their final, logical ending point. We already have a split between our civilian public and the military. With no more draft, no more declaration of wars, no tax or war bonds, and now the hope that the Americans at risk are just going to be more and more American machines, we must worry that the already lowering bars to war may well hit the ground.
Reminiscent of the Star Trek episode where two enemy peoples fight each other but not on the battlefield, in direct contact. Whenever the war game demonstrated one side had won a battle (but not the war), the losing side sent some of its people to a location to be killed (the number that probably would have been killed violently in the fight). This Star Trek episode was to comment on how “civilized” war could become…but, not really.
Singer has been helpful to me over the course of the thesis process. Glad to see his book getting a lot of attention.
