When perusing the news site news.com.au, the lead story was 'Stop the war bots before they decide to kill us all, Australian bioethicist warns'. Now, this title is quite dramatic, but it was paired with an image of a massive robot wreaking havoc, so with my interest duly manipulated, I read it, expecting to read about some crackpot professor who was screaming about the evils of technology. Not so. The article is actually about how the replacing of face-to-face combat with technology-based combat in warfare is dangerous to humanity. The lecturer in question, a Dr Sparrow, is part of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, which is a group of people 'concerned about the pressing dangers that military robots pose to peace and international security and to civilians in war'. I had no idea these people even existed. Dr Sparrow suggests that 'the threshold of conflict has been lowered', and that the way people are engaging with warfare now is not unlike videogames.
I found this a really interesting article (once I got over my disappointment of not being presented with a fellow-technophobe), because the idea of technology based combat is to reduce the human casualties, which is clearly not being done. By removing the horror from war, we make it less of an issue. Death suddenly doesn't seem real anymore. At the same time, death is being brought closer, because there is always the possibility of technological misfire. The thing that struck me most about this article was the suggestion that there may be a war bot in the future that will kill small children because it is unable to differentiate between a dangerous movement and a small child offering an icecream to share. Moral panic? Maybe. But as we become more and more reliant on technology, we do need to address just what it is that the technology does for us.
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