After the machine that I use to test my blood sugar levels for diabetes came up with an error message last week, I rang customer service and a replacement turned up at my door the next day. But after hearing about how reliant the military is becoming on technology a lot more dangerous than my BSL monitor, I got scared.
It's not the fact that the military is developing machines called the HULC, the PETMAN, or a plane that is hoped will fly from Australia to London in two to three hours, or that the global market in military hardware and software is worth $1.7 trillion, or even that a top advisor to Barack Obama during the president's first campaign, P.W Singer believes that robots have started to think for themselves.
What scares me is what happens if one of these robots gets an error message? One of the machines that Singer talks about with great enthusiasm is the "sword system", a 50-calibre machine gun about the size of a lawnmower that can hit an apple from hundreds of metres away. The only problem is it can't tell the difference between that apple and a tomato, which any two-year-old boy can tell. What happens if the error on the sword system says "Fruit nof recognised." Does it shoot or not?
At home we have a pie maker, and a cookie jar that yells at you when you open the lid, I love gadgets, but my fear in letting robots think for us is summed up by the story of an ironically titled "pilot" in one of the US "pilotless predator drone squadrons." He described how each morning he woke up, drove in to work, sat behind a computer screen, put missiles on targets and killed enemy combatants. He could also have cereal while he was sitting there, and then at the end of the day, he'd get back in the car, drive home, and 20 minutes after killing people he'd be sitting at the dinner table talking to his kids about their schoolwork.
My blood sugar monitor problem was sorted out within 2 days because a human spoke to a human, but what happens if a military robot has a problem in the heat of battle? Can they wait until a call centre honours a warranty and sends out a replacement for the faulty part?
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