February 24, 2005
We Support Our "Troops"
The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force... [...]
Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see, and react increasingly like humans. In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their autonomy.
How well will the robokillers work? Probably about as well as "National Missile Defense", which has failed test after test after test -- but still manages to get billions and billions and billions of taxpayer dollars thrown its way.
Or about as well as the two-billion-taxpayer-dollars-a-pop Stealth bomber, which "cannot go out in the rain".
What happens when the robots get taken out of carpeted, climate-controlled rooms and dropped into the desert sands of Iraq -- which have extracted "an amazing toll on combat vehicles, generators, just about everything"?
What happens when some ten-year-old kid sneaks up on the robots with a can of spray paint and covers over their robo-eyes? What happens when somebody turns on a transistor radio within a few hundred yards of the robots? Or when some fourteen-year-old kid downloads a bunch of spyware into the robots' gizzards?
Well, it's all good:
The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion. [Emphasis added.]
See? The high-tech shit doesn't need to "work", it just needs taxpayers to line military contractors' pockets. If it doesn't "work", that only proves that taxpayers need to spend some more money.
But, what if the robots do work like they're supposed to? This is where it gets kinda interesting:
Colin Angle, 37, is the chief executive and another co-founder of iRobot, a private company he helped start in his living room 14 years ago. ... He believes the calculus of money, morals, and military logic will result in battalions of robots in combat.
"The cost of the soldier in the field is so high, both in cash and in a political sense," Angle said, that "robots will be doing wildly dangerous tasks" in battle in the very near future.
In other words, those flesh-and-blood soldiers that Limbaugh and O'Reilly are maniacally exhorting us to "support" would soon enough be looking for work. And, assuming the robots will also be authorised to conduct "homeland security" operations, Limbaugh and O'Reilly will be maniacally exhorting us to support the robocops in their project of blowing away in droves the unemployed veterans. After all, prisons can only hold so many niggers -- better to just shoot them down and be done with it.
But hey, it's never too early to begin fashioning your Luddite Hammer.
Posted by Eddie Tews at February 24, 2005 11:00 AM
Comments
In related news, Will Segways become battlefield bots? -- Posted by: Emi on March 20, 2005 06:49 PM