My Computer Said Kill,

I Said Alright!

click to see spread full-size (PDF)
Illustration by John Gruen and Caroline Hu
design by alice shay and alexis smagula

BY WILLIAM ST. JAMES SMITH

In the coming months robots will begin accompanying US soldiers as they patrol Iraqi streets. Already, the military uses robots for bomb detection and surveillance, but soon, some of these robots will be armed with weapons capable of firing up to 1,000 rounds a minute. Robot warfare will not be limited to ground infantry, either. A fleet of unmanned aircrafts will be capable of both performing reconnaissance and delivering ordinance simultaneously.

The movie industry would have us believe that we should be paranoid about the prospect of a robot army-humans never seem to fare too well against the terminators and matrices that we create. But there's nothing to worry about now, of course, because human soldiers will control their robot counterparts with laptop computers, at least until our technology is foolproof and we can trust the robots to think for themselves. Our war-making capabilities will be more efficient, safer for us, and less expensive. After all, the Pentagon has been working on this new army for over 30 years, building upon lessons of modern combat gleaned from the past century's wars.

During WWI the US military underwent a revolution in training. Studies assessing the efficacy of boot camps showed that when target practice involved circular bulls-eye style targets, no matter how sure their aim and how steadfast their patriotism, many soldiers were still not adequately prepared to overcome the psychological and moral barriers that dissuade us from killing other human beings. In combat, when confronted with the prospect of firing on another human, some soldiers would just keep loading their guns again and again, without ever firing.

What the military realized was that it was not enough for soldiers to be capable of shooting; they had to be willing to kill as well. For that to happen, firing on other people had to be normalized in the training regiment-the representations of enemy soldiers in training had to correspond with what American soldiers would see in actual combat. Human silhouettes were substituted for a round bulls-eye target in training sessions and suddenly soldiers became much more open to shooting at people on the battlefield. By WWII, firing rates had increased dramatically. Silhouettes representing the torso and head of a clearly delineated enemy in an opposite trench sufficed for the first half of the 20th century, but in order to confront the threats of the 21st century, the military has developed a more sophisticated kind of simulation. It is now essential to account for a potential difficulty that kids from rural Ohio might face when trying to distinguish friend from foe when battling non-uniformed, non-professional insurgents.

To this end, the Army has developed a video game, called "America's Army" that would ostensibly help young soldiers learn to make wise decisions in chaotic environment of urban warfare, but which has also been released to the public, as a form of entertainment.

Stronger, Faster, Better

I remember how much my freshman year roommate enjoyed playing a videogame that simulated combat. The sounds of gunfire and screaming emanated from his computer all night long. My roommate was very talented at his game. From behind his desk, in his slippers and sweatpants, he would often brag of his exploits 'killing' other players on the internet. While I could never imagine that these videogames would somehow compel my roommate to bring a gun to school, the social pathology that many critics of videogames focus on, it seems that by the US military's standards he would make a pretty good soldier. His aim was steady, and he had no qualms about doing away with the digital avatars that represented his friends.

The development of a human/robot combat system allows for actual warfare to be conducted as if it were a videogame, making the Army's recent foray into computer entertainment particularly notable. A military robot manufacturer (yes, this is an actual industry) called Irobot Corporation (and yes, they actually named the company after Isaac Asimov's dystopian fantasy story of robots trying to take over the world) has produced a video that showcases their robots by imagining what combat will look like in the future (http://www.irobot.com/governmentindustrial/ product_detail.cfm?prodid=34). Set in a non-descript Middle Eastern country, the video shows how human soldiers will be fully integrated with their robotic counterparts as they survey the battlefield, locate targets, and move in for the kill. The Future Combat System, which is what Irobot calls its vision for national defense, looks a lot like a videogame, and not just because of the aesthetics of Irobot's computer animated video. Soldiers in the future will be able to make kills by directing ordinance toward a target on a touch-screen computer. Robotic assets, potentially armed, will confront the targets identified by other robots, while human operators decide who will live and who will not from behind a computer screen.

Even though few robots in the Future Combat video actually kill anyone (except for one amazing scene in which an insurgent, fleeing the overwhelming shock and awe tactics of America's cyborg army, gets lit up by a self-contained rolling gun machine), the robots do act in what amounts to a lethal capacity by providing soldiers with digital images of targets. Flying robots the size of coffee-makers conduct reconnaissance, providing soldiers with real time images and maps, which are then used to direct attacks.

Game Over

Though only a video for now, the Department of Defense has indicated that Irobot's vision for future combat complies with national security priorities. In the future, it seems, there will be little distinction between representations of the enemy as displayed on computer screens and the enemy itself. The image becomes the interface for fully automated killing so that in the future, the retina will be the primary instrument of violence.

Mediating the contact between our soldiers and our enemies, robotic infantry and unmanned fighter aircraft will certainly result in fewer American casualties. And because robot soldiers don't eat or suffer mental illness, they will dramatically reduce the monetary cost of any future nation building exercises we may choose to embark upon.

But at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, that might not necessarily be a good thing. I don't mean to seem nostalgic for the romantic ideal of being able to see the 'whites of a man's eyes' before blowing him away, but by collapsing the distinctions between entertainment, military training, and actual combat, we sidestep the consequences of violence and warfare. The mediated, representational warfare that can be conducted via robots negates an important sense of identification that necessarily develops between the killer and the person being killed.

What makes acts of violence so powerful is that when one person kills another, there is an implicit understanding that the roles could very well be reversed. (We all know that we will eventually die, after all, which is not something that can be said for flying machine guns). When robots get involved, this sense of identification breaks down. Robots don't identify with the people they're targeting for destruction, nor should the soldier identify with the digital image he or she is gunning down. It just happens, and it's done. Of course, current cyborg war theories assume that only one belligerent (America) will have killer robots. The eventuality of robot-on-robot violence will pose new questions-spiritual, moral and political- that will force us to reconsider our national defense policies. But these are challenges that future Future Combat Systems will have to overcome.

By eliminating the more difficult psychological problems that warfare elicits now, our cyborg army will make going to war more politically viable. The representations of war fed to the civilian public will be decidedly one-sided; it's easy to imagine the graphics we'll be fed as our robots tirelessly shoot video along with their guns. By contrast there would be fewer photos of coffins draped in American flags and fewer families to mourn the causalities. Fewer soldiers would have to confront the reality that they ended another person's life. Everything about fighting would be cheaper, faster and better, but maybe that's not something to aspire to. The inherent complexity and difficulty of war is perhaps its saving grace, potentially rarifying our ability to fight and also etching memories of horrific violence onto our consciousness as a warning for the future. Robots, on the other hand, can be deployed anytime, anywhere, and not a single one is going to write a novel about alienation afterwards.

WILL SMITH B'05 was so last year

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