The Shape of Shit to Come. Steve Lowe

fact, robots that kill are very much on the agenda – the military being one of the key funders in the field (and in such volume that the US Future Combat Systems program was called ‘the system that ate the army’). And the war robots blow Asimov’s rules somewhat: when the humans are fighting, how should the robots pick sides? Toss a coin?

      In all, 56 countries are developing robot military devices, to dispense battlefield death with a clinical excellence lacking in most humans. One recent report suggested 40 per cent of the world’s armies will become automated by 2020. The Pentagon is pumping astronomical amounts of money into this stuff, for land, sea and air. The US Navy has already started operating robot helicopters with electronic ‘brains’ that can recognise small pirate boats through 3D laser imaging. Pirates! In an adventure with flying robots. Now that I would pay money to see. Are you listening, Aardman? I want my cut, though. Not like last time.

      Iraq and Afghanistan are/were crawling with unmanned drones and bomb disposal bots (in 2008 there were 22 different types of unmanned equipment, and possibly 12,000 units, at work in Iraq). The people who brought us the Roomba vacuum cleaner are also now providing the Pentagon with a new contract for tiny robots called Throwbots that can be air-dropped onto battlefields and work with each other in deadly tiny robot networks (not sure if they hoover up the mess afterwards). Also imminent is MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), a remote-controlled platform complete with machine gun, grenade launchers and a loudspeaker to point out – presumably unnecessarily – that resistance is futile.

      It’s not difficult to see the benefits of robot soldiers. Robot soldiers really take the effort out of any war effort. Training men to become killing machines takes time and money – why not just start off with killing machines in the first place? In the words of Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.’

      They don’t go on racist rampages. (He didn’t say the last bit.)

      The military is also, ironically, a pioneer in the field of robot surgery, the USA developing a mobile field hospital pod that means surgery can be done remotely close to the battlefield, thus cutting down the time before soldiers get treated. (If my research on this is anything to go by – it was watching MASH – this will free up the surgeons to perform elaborate practical jokes on the more uptight officers in their regiment.)

      So, will wars of the future involve expensive robot armies fighting it out? Or expensive robot armies shooting seven bells of hell out of people who can’t afford expensive robot armies? I wonder. (Not really, it will be the second one.) (Well, unless the USA and China line up their bots.)

      Already, about a third of US warplanes are robots. The Predator drone debuted in the Balkans and has been used extensively in Iraq and Pakistan. It’s a whole new, removed way of doing war. The US-based controllers of missile-firing Predator drones (so-called ‘cubicle warriors’) might consign people to death in the day, only to clock off at five never having seen a battlefield: ‘Hi honey, how was work today?’ ‘Good actually. We’ve got a cool new game called “Towelhead 2”.’ (By the way, the video game metaphor in all this technology is underlined by manufacturers even using video game controllers for some of their systems.)

      Not that all are happy to use robot warriors without qualms. In June 2012, extraordinary news emerged of Obama’s kill list – names of the al-Qaeda operatives slowly being summarily executed by drones in Yemen on the personal say-so of the president after he has consulted his religious books, his conscience and – by implication – his Maker. A US president agonising over St Thomas Aquinas before sending in the killer robots: it’s already happened.

      Missile-firing drones might be very clever, but for now they still need to be controlled. Eventually they will fly themselves and fire at will. And robot soldiers will be autonomously tasked with making life and death decisions – it seems inevitable. So much for Asimov. (Although he might be pleased that the Pentagon has paid science fiction writers to dream up sci-fi war stuff for them to then go off and invent.)

      Robots at war are a game-changer. P. W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, hails a revolution, like the introduction of cannons or nuclear weapons: ‘one of the most fundamental changes ever in war’. Because we are changing not just the lethality of war (very much so), but the identity of who fights it. ‘Humanity’s 5,000 year old monopoly over the fighting of war is over,’ he says.

      Are robot soldiers going to be bigger bastards than real soldiers? With none of the ‘good guys’ at risk, will it mean anything goes against the ‘bad guys’? With humans not being central, the ‘warrior ethos’ and rules of war will be up for grabs. And wars will become easier to start … And there could be malfunctions – like the automated anti-aircraft system that, at a South African training exercise, started ‘firing wildly, spraying high-explosive shells at a rate of 550 a minute, swinging around through 360 degrees like a high-pressure hose’, killing nine.