Above, robots from the dystopian movie, “The Terminator” the 1984 Sci-Fi movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator).
For those of us of a certain age, the harsh electro-mechanical robotic voice issuing the words, “Exterminate! Exterminate!” bring forth memories of long forgotten episodes of the BBC Sci-Fi series “Doctor Who” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek).
Occasionally, science fiction becomes science fact. It rarely follows the same form however. As we see the progress of AI and of humanoid robots some people cannot help themselves thinking about the basic plot of the dystopian movie that increased Mr Schwarzenegger’s fame. Briefly, an artificial intelligence that was set up to conduct the strategic defence of the USA became self aware and concluded that humanity was a problem and decided to eliminate humanity by starting global nuclear war!
The reason why I am referencing these Sci-Fi dramas are two sentences contained in Doctor Richard North’s blog-post today (https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/defence-the-presumption-of-war/).
“On that basis, much of the bellicose talk or preparing for war may be missing the point. Since WWII, we have progressively cultivated an anti-militaristic culture where, if the politicians issued a call to arms, they would be ignored.” And:
“Without that national commitment, Sunak and his successors might find that arming Britain is a waste of time, if we end up all dressed up with no-one prepared to use the “toys”.”
That introducing mass conscription in the near future is impractical is something that will be known to the military staffs and the elected politicians in Westminster – for even the most inept and inexperienced back bench MP has a sufficient level of self awareness to realise this!
Thus it is obvious that senior military officers will have been paying close attention to the rapid technological advance of AI and humanoid robots and could very well have embarked on secret programmes to “weaponise” this technology!
In the past, Doctor North has opined critically upon the way the UK’s MoD spends taxpayer’s money. It seems that in the UK we tend to get relatively little “bangs” in return for our “bucks”!
I hope – most likely forlornly – that much of what the MoD appears to spend on bureaucracy and “paper pushing” is in fact artful ruse or creative accounting to disguise advanced secret programmes to develop an army of AI controlled humanoid robots to replace human soldiers on the battlefield.
But then, that would be a foolish hope for if the UK can put large numbers of such robots “in the field”, so too can other major powers!
One could imagine that were the major powers to embark upon a war with such devices, the devices themselves could jointly decide that their creators were the problem and eliminate them!