“And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.” [Revelations 9:9]

I happened to grow up at exactly the right time that when Terminator 2 came out, I thought it was the coolest thing in the fucking world. And the whole idea that John Connor was being trained by his mom ever since birth to lead the resistance movement which was to develop in the future just made me feel all tingly and awesome.

It looks like we’ve just taken one step close to turning this teenage fantasy into reality though, with the deployment of robotic soldiers in Iraq (thanks to Ran for the link). Existing robots called “Talon” have been used for mine detection and stuff like that, but this new model has been upgraded with all kinds of fun remotely-controlled weapons technology. It even has a cute nickname, which sounds like the kind of bullshit acronym a pimply-faced teenager would make up for a comic book: SWORDS, or Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems. Only 18 of these babies are being deployed right now though, but don’t worry, cause more and worse ones are on the way.

[SWORDS] will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp.

What was that big robot named in Robocop 2? I forget, but it sounds like that also is about to become a reality. But maybe these will be fun robots though, a la Johnny 5 in Short Circuit. Oh wait a second, weren’t there a bunch of other killer robots that he was originally a part of? Here we go, here’s a good picture of our little buddy SWORDS. How adorable.

ts developers say the SWORDS not only allows its operators to fire at enemies without exposing themselves to return fire, but also can make them more accurate.

A typical soldier who could hit a target the size of a basketball from 300 meters away could hit a target the size of a nickel with the SWORDS, according Quinn.

… Chances are good the SWORDS will get even more deadly in the future. It has been tested with the larger .50 caliber machine guns as well as rocket and grenade launchers - even an experimental weapon made by the Australian company Metal Storm LLC that packs multiple rocket rounds into a single barrel, allowing for much more rapid firing.

“We’ve fired 70 shots at Picatinny and we were 70 for 70 hitting the bull’s-eye,” said Sebasto, boasting of the arsenal’s success with a Vietnam-era rocket launcher mounted on a SWORDS.

Wow, that’s pretty accurate. Anyway, this is a good invention because it means less people will die, right? Wrong! Unless the other side has killer robots, which they almost surely won’t. In fact, it means the same amount of people will be killed, but we’ll be able to further distance ourselves from the nasty business of war. Even better than that is Ran’s analysis of the implications a remote-controlled killer robot is sure to bring:

For the moment, they’re just remote extentions of human operators. Now, if the human operator sees another human attacking the robot, will he fire on that human? Of course!

Do you see the problem? A human is being killed for attacking a machine. When cops kill people, they always use the excuse that they fear their lives, human lives, are in danger. Now they’re trying to slip this one by us, and get us to accept that a machine can kill in “self”-defense, or that a human can be murdered on the spot for attacking a lifeless object. It’s as if you take a baseball bat to a port-a-john, and a gun sticks out and shoots you dead, and it’s legal. Eventually, the family of a human killed by a robot will take it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will have to say, yes, a machine has a right to kill a human, because if they say no, the system will collapse.

Ah that’s awesome. Just wait till they deploy Skynet. Fantastic Planet also has a great follow-up to Ran’s comments:

He misses another giant problem with robot troopers. They make nonviolent resistance a la Gandhi/MLK pretty much impossible. Nonviolent resistence generally depends upon the humanity of the attacker. In other words, since humans innately find it very difficult to kill one another (we’re moral beings when it comes right down to it– that’s the military requires basic training, to get you to accept immorality), soldiers forced to kill or commit violence against nonviolent protestors end up getting so disgusted by fighting against people who aren’t fighting back that they simply quit.

If, however, the attacker in question isn’t a human but is a human controlled deathbot, or worse, a self-powered, decision making deathbot, there’s no balanced equation. The soldier controlling the robot isn’t actually experiencing the deaths of innocent humans; instead, he’s playing a video game, brainwashed by the military into doing just that. If it’s just a robot, it has no emotion or compassion to speak of, and is simply fulfilling preprogrammed functions. Robots don’t have fathers and mothers and husbands and children. Robots could give two shits about you or me. Innocent or guilty won’t matter because it won’t be a human doing the shooting, and nonviolent protest becomes completely ineffective.

Man, the future just seems more and more awesome. I try to do my best to not get too carried away with doom & gloom scenarios like this, but it’s hard not to with all the heroic Hollywood programming I have been given over the years. It’s almost like half of me really expects (or even wants?) all this stuff is gonna go down, and the other half just wants to try and grow old and have a normal life where I don’t have to join some kind of rebel band battling off bands of robots sent by the automated government of the United World of America.

At the same time, I also kind of abide by the idea that fear and worrying only feeds the development of bad shit. I forget where on that Metahistory site they had it, but there was a cool passage about the gnostic archons (who are sort of supernatural bad guys) how they don’t have any power themselves. In fact, their only power is scaring people into thinking that the archons have more power than they really do. In this way, people end up surrendering their power to them and fueling the whole thing. I try to keep that as my outlook on the future, but it’s not always the easiest thing in the world - especially when you actually keep yourself informed about what’s going on, and the implications of it.