SSY takes a stand against Skynet

Future face of Kent Police

Earlier this year The Guardian reported how a group of police forces and government agencies are working with BAE systems to adapt military drone robots for use in spying on UK citizens.

The flying robots are currently used in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world to monitor and mount attacks by remote.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 it had no military robots on the ground, and only a few unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, just in Iraq, the US military is using 7000 drones and around 12, 000 ground robots. Although the US military is driving the development of military robots, the UK and other major arms manufacturing countries aren’t far behind. The Ministry of Defence has hosted robotics competitions to design new surveillance bots, and recently bought 100 Dragon Runner robots. Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Singapore and Israel. China, Russia and India all have military robotics programmes of their own.

Without any real public scrutiny or comment, the way our governments conduct war, and indeed carry out police operations at home, is becoming increasingly robotocised. What’s wrong with this? On the face of it surely less human casualties for our soldiers is a good thing?

In Vietnam 58, 000 US soldiers died, compared to a few thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. A lot of this has to do with advancing technology, better medical techniques etc. However, over the past century civilian casualties in war have rocketed. In World War 1 civilians were only 10% of those that died. Today they make up as much as 90% of war casaulties. For example, it’s been reported that 1 million Pakistanis have fled their homes because of threat of US drone attacks on the border with Afghanistan. The people of the North-West Frontier Province must be wondering where their John Connor is.

Predator drone

Military chiefs have recognised since Vietnam that it’s often difficult to make ordinary people pull the trigger and kill a fellow human being. Even unconsciously, many will aim their guns high rather than shoot someone. It’s one of the reasons that the US moved away from using conscription to recruiting their army. They wanted a professional force of highly motivated trained killers.

Since Vietnam, the US military has becoming increasingly dependent on air power, and satellite monitoring from space. Now the sudden upsurge in the use of robots continues the trend-increasingly US soldiers in other countries are able to kill at a distance, probably with a video screen in between. This makes it much easier to indiscriminately destroy any suspected threats, meaning more civilians get killed in the process. For a generation of military robot operators who have grown up doing similar tasks in computer games again and again, it’s easy to see how they get desensitised to the misery they’re causing from afar.

Anti-war campaigners are currently able to get a lot of support because many people in Britain and the US are angry about the numbers of our troops dying in imperial wars. One of the main drives behind developing new robots is a hope by the government that this means they can reduce the numbers dying significantly. While nobody wants to see working class kids sent to die, we also don’t want to see the government feeling free to intervene anywhere it feels like it using robot troops.

The boom in military robots is also making a lot of money for arms manufacturers, like the privatised UK government agency turned international evil megacorp QinetiQ.

And now, with the news that the police in the UK are going to have access to surveillance drones, we’re about to see a dramatic increase in the ability of the state to spy on us wherever we go. The people of the UK already have more CCTV watching them than anywhere else on Earth. There’s about 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people in Britain.

But with the use of drones the police will be able to cheaply monitor anywhere they want from above, which obviously has implications for political activists that get up to things the government don’t like.

The good news is that anti-war activists are starting to wake up to the threat posed by military robots and take action, especially in the US. In January there was a protest outside the CIA headquarters against the use of drones. Members of the Pittsburgh Organising Group blockaded the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the largest academic military contractors in the country. Fourteen activists were arrested in the action, which successfully shut down the robotics lab for the day.

Some companies, like iRobot, make both civilian and military robots. iRobot manufactures both the PackBot and the Roomba home cleaning bot. Such companies are potentially worried about public pressure, and should be targeted.

An interesting possible future development would be that the enemies of the US and its allies could get in on the military robot revolution. There’ve been reports that Hizbollah have used drones against Israel. There’s also been the news that Iraqi insurgents have been able to hack into the live feed from US predator drones.

Just in case you think I’m making this up, or exaggerating the threat, here’s a look at some of the latest developments in robotics.

This is the SWORDS robot, that is armed and able to kill:

Here’s some footage of the truly terrifying (but still cool to look at, I know) BigDog robot, designed with funding from the military to be an artificial pack mule carrying gear over difficult terrain:

BigDog has got a little friend, the LittleDog.

This is a group of swimming robots based on a fish, with obvious potential naval applications.

Something that is especially creepy is the potential now to remotely control insects and intercept what they see for the use of surveillance. Check out this cyborg moth:

Perhaps the most crazy idea of all though is the EATR. This stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. The basic idea is that it would be able to operate alone out in the field for a long period without going back to base to refuel. Hence EATR-it can take organic matter from the environment and turn it into fuel. This has, unsurprisingly, got a lot of people worried. The idea of a potentially flesh eating killer robot on the loose is something that does not appeal to anyone who is even half way sane.

Artists' impression of the future EATR robot

The manufacturers and government agencies working on this technology have strictly denied that the EATR would ever start using the “organic matter” contained in the corpses of those it kills as fuel. They claim it is strictly vegetarian. Yet their own documents talk about chicken fat as a potential fuel, so the possibility that it could use fuel derived from animals, including humans, is clearly there.

Although many of these robots are developing the capacity for autonomous action, that is to take decisions on their own without the need for a human operator, we’re still quite a few years away from something with the intelligence of a Terminator or a Cylon.

And we shouldn’t be against the advances in robotics technology going on per se. It’s just that no technology is neutral-people design things with a goal in mind. And in our society one of the main goals is to make sure that the world’s most powerful countries are able to dominate the planet and exploit its peoples at the minimum cost to themselves.

But even with the prospect of robots becoming self-aware and nuking humanity isn’t quite on the horizon yet, some experts are already calling for serious thinking about military robots. Many have demanded that governments start thinking now about the implications of taking the decision of whether or not to kill someone out of human hands and putting it on an autonomous robot.

But SSY has a slightly more radical idea: how about we just don’t build KillBots. Doesn’t sound so crazy really, does it? Here’s a couple of documentaries that might win you round if you don’t agree:

XKCD: More Accurate: