When will humans turn over the job of war to robot slaves? According to Peter W Singer, author of the new book Wired for War, it's happening already. In this week's Science Saturday, Peter and John Horgan discuss the role of robots in the success of the Iraq surge and whether America is starting to look like a bit like Skynet to the people of the Middle East. They also discuss reasons to fear the coming of cyborgs and whether robots might not someday bring about the end of war.
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There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five.
Robots will become far more a weapon of war, but it will not end war, any more than staged sports contests will end war.
When a conflict rises to the war state, it has already passed the normal rule based bounds of civilization. It's persued until on side is so decimated that it cannot continue or has completely lost the will to continue. Losing robots does not put a nation in that position. The losing side (or both sides) will put more and more on the line, at more and more risk until the conflict simply cannot be continued.