Wired for War by P. J. Singer
Highlights:
Your highlight at location 378
As the chief wrote, “When a robot dies, you don’t have to write a letter to its mother.”
Your highlight at location 763
One of the early scares in the war on terrorism was the rash of letters carrying deadly anthrax powder
sent to prominent officials and media. Some of the powder also leaked out inside post offices. Since
those attacks, some one thousand robots have been installed to sort parcels, with the U.S. Postal
Service planning to add as many as eighty thousand more.
Your highlight at location 764
Some of the powder also leaked out inside post offices. Since those attacks, some one thousand robots
have been installed to sort parcels, with the U.S. Postal Service planning to add as many as eighty
thousand more.
Your highlight at location 1036
Among his current projects is one for the Department of Transportation on “how to get the driver out of
the car and save lives.” Finkelstein is optimistic that this will happen “certainly in the range of 2015-
2030."
Your highlight at location 1163
At a congressional hearing on February 8, 2000, it finally all came together for military robotics on the
“demand” side. Senator John Warner from Virginia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, laid down a gauntlet, mandating into the Pentagon’s budget that by 2010, one-third of all the
aircraft designed to attack behind enemy lines be unmanned, and that by 2015, one-third of all ground
combat vehicles be driverless.
Your highlight at location 1228
The more the military used unmanned systems, the more people came to believe that machines brought
certain advantages to the battlefield. “They don’t get hungry,” says Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s
Joint Forces Command. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy
next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Your highlight at location 1232
For example, with aerial refueling, spy planes are now able to stay in flight for as long as twenty hours or
more. And yet the air force has found that humans lose effectiveness after ten to twelve hours. They
simply wear down physically and psychologically from doing the same task that long. Unmanned
systems, by contrast, don’t need to sleep, don’t need to eat, and find monitoring empty desert sands as
exciting as partying at the Playboy Mansion. As one unmanned plane advertisement put it, “Can you
keep your eyes open for thirty hours without blinking?”
Your highlight at location 1243
Even then, there are other kinds of dirty that robots may be more apt for. As an air force captain
comments, things as simple as “inclement weather, smog, and smoke can hinder pilot visibility. How is
this different between a manned and unmanned aircraft? The UAV has EO/IR/SARS [electro-optical,
infrared, and synthetic-aperture radar sensors] to rely on. The pilot has the Mark I Eyeball.”
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It could maneuver so fast and hard that its pilots blacked out.”
Your highlight at location 1257
Automobile crash avoidance technologies illustrate that a digital system can recognize a danger and
react in about the same time that the human driver can only get to mid-curse word.
Your highlight at location 1266
A computer, by contrast, can share that skill or knowledge with another computer or robot in only the
time that it takes to download the software file.
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a new mandate in the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the Defense Department budget.
Congress ordered the Pentagon to show a “preference for joint unmanned systems in acquisition
programs for new systems, including a requirement under any such program for the development of a
manned system for a certification that an unmanned system is incapable of meeting program
requirements.” If the U.S. military was going to buy a new weapon, it would now have to justify why it was
not a robotic one.
Your highlight at location 1467
Autonomy, then, relates to many of the same questions that we usually use to define a human being’s
maturity.
Your highlight at location 1532
Overall, the size of the AI market was estimated by the Business Communications Company to be
roughly $21 billion in 2007 with annual growth of 12.2 percent.
Your highlight at location 1535
Up until today, each of the functions of war took place within the human body and mind. The warrior’s
eyes saw the target, their brain identified it as a threat, and then it told their hands where to direct the
weapon, be it a sword or rifle or missile. Now each of these tasks is being outsourced to the machine.
For this reason, the U.S. military funds as much as 80 percent of all AI research in the United States.
Thus, while firms like Microsoft or Google lead and the military follows in other parts of the information
technology world, the military sets the agenda in AI.
Your highlight at location 1574
“five senses” (and yes, there are electronic taste and smell sensors that can even identify wines and
cheeses as well as most sommeliers),
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the LRAD puts out what soldiers affectionately call “the brown sound.” That is, it sends acoustic waves in
such frequencies that they overwhelm the human body and even make a targeted person defecate
upon themselves. The devices have a range of up to one kilometer. The LRAD actually made its first
combat debut not with the military but on a vacation cruise ship. In 2005, one of the Seaborne line’s
luxury ships was attacked off Somalia by pirates armed with machine guns and rockets. Instead of
fighting them off with shuffleboard sticks, the crew used LRAD sonic blasters to chase them away.
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One already tested out in Iraq is the Active Denial System. Sometimes called the “pain ray,” the system
shoots out waves like those used to heat up frozen pizza in a microwave oven. The rays, which have a
range of over five football fields, penetrate the top sixty-fourth layer of skin (even if you are wearing
clothes over the skin) and heat up the water inside. The ray doesn’t permanently hurt the person, or
even cause a sunburn. But the sensation is excruciating, enough to make test subjects feel like their
skin was catching on fire. If the ray is turned off, or the person moves out of its focus, the pain instantly
ends.
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using rechargeable batteries in some way, such as through an electrical hookup, or even through an
infrared beam, as the Roomba uses.
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At the University of Texas, researchers have built a tiny fuel cell that draws electricity from the glucose-
oxygen reaction in human blood. It is called a “vampire-bot.” A group of Japanese scientists working on
a similar project found that such systems could draw about 100 watts, equal to a bright lightbulb, from
the blood of one human being.
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DARPA even employs a self-described “combat zoologist,” who describes his job as “getting robots to
jump, run, crawl, do things that nature does well. We’re evolving our machines to be more like animals.”
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As one said, “Fact of nature: There are no large land creatures with six legs and there never have
been.”
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When something is moving at an “exponential” pace, it grows faster and faster each time it gets bigger.
A familiar example is the idea of compound interest. Imagine a genie offers you the choice of either $1
million today or a magic penny that doubles in value every day for one month. The obvious choice would
seem to be to take the $1 million. But that would actually be the sucker’s play. Because of the
exponential growth, the penny would be worth $10 million at the end of that month.
Your highlight at location 1962
This convergence of exponential trends is why technologic change, especially for electronics, comes not
only quicker, but in bundles, rather than staying within one category. While microchip performance is
now doubling roughly every eighteen months and storage every fifteen months, we are also seeing
similar acceleration in categories far and wide. Wireless capacity doubles every nine months. Optical
capacity doubles every twelve months. The cost/performance ratio of Internet service providers is
doubling every twelve months. Internet bandwidth backbone is doubling roughly every twelve months.
The number of human genes mapped per year doubles every eighteen months. The resolution of brain
scans (a key to understanding how the brain works, an important part of creating strong AI) doubles
every twelve months. And, as a by-product, the number of personal and service robots has so far
doubled every nine months.
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If Moore’s law continues to play out, some pretty amazing advancements will happen that will shape the
world of robots and war. By 2029, $1,000 computers would do twenty million billion calculations a
second, equivalent to what a thousand brains can do. This means that the sum total of human
brainpower would be less than 1 percent of all the thinking power on the globe.
Your highlight at location 2012
Hugo de Garis, the head of the StarBrain AI project, has written a cheerily titled article on this entitled
“Building Gods or Building Our Potential Exterminators?” In it he writes, “Within a single human
generation, it will very probably be possible to store a single bit of information on a single atom.” If this
proves true, an object the size of a disc then would be able to hold a trillion trillion (a 1 with twenty-four
zeros after it) bits of information. By comparison, the human brain is created from a genome of roughly
twenty-three million bits of information. If computers can match this almost incomprehensible processing
speed with such amazing memory, the advantage that human brains have of being so parallel starts to
fall by the wayside.
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Dreyfus is a noted philosopher at the University of California-Berkeley, located in the heart of Singularity
fandom. In 1967, he famously predicted that no computer would ever beat him at chess. It turns out he
wasn’t the greatest of players and lost to a computer in his first and only match soon after. Dreyfus, who
went on to author the 1972 book What Computers Can’t Do, was undeterred. He revised his prediction
to say that a computer would never be able to beat a skilled chess player, a nationally ranked player. A
computer soon did. When that happened, he revised his prediction again (as well as his book title, which
in 1992 was reissued as What Computers Still Can’t Do), claiming that while computers may be able to
beat most humans, they would never be able to beat the very best, such as the world champion
chessmaster. Of course, this then happened in 1997 with IBM’s Deep Blue.
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Spartan Scout had stopped. As one report put it, “The civilian sailors were somewhat taken aback when
they were interrogated by this Arab speaking boat that had no one aboard.”
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Among the planes being made at the military’s flight test center near Groom Lake, Nevada, better known
as Area 51, is the Lockheed Martin “Polecat.” Described as looking like “a B-2 bomber’s chick,” the
bomber drone is made of only two hundred parts that are glued, rather than riveted, together to
increase its stealthiness. It will be rigged up with “a fully autonomous flight control and mission-handling
system,” meaning it will be able to carry out its mission from takeoff to landing without any human
instruction. Lockheed Martin claims its studies show Polecat to be five times more survivable and
mission-effective than the air force’s plans for a manned bomber version of its new F-22 fighter jet.
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It costs roughly $9,100 a pound to launch anything into space with the Space Shuttle. So if a system is
to be manned, the humans and each and every pound of water, food, and oxygen tanks to keep them
alive are expensive to send. Likewise, manned systems in space are incredibly vulnerable (one bullet or
laser hole and there goes all the air). Instead, the United States has already started work on a number
of unmanned systems for potential use in space.
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Perhaps most telling is a report that Joint Forces Command drew up in 2005, which suggested that
autonomous robots on the battlefield will be the norm within twenty years. Its title was somewhat
amusing, given the official mantra one usually hears on the issue: “Unmanned Effects: Taking the
Human Out of the Loop.” So, despite what one article called “all the lip service paid to keeping a human
in the loop,” autonomous armed robots are coming to war. They simply make too much sense to the
people that matter. A special operations forces officer put it this way: “That’s exactly the kind of thing
that scares the shit out of me.... But we are on the pathway already. It’s inevitable.”
Your highlight at location 2543
In 2004, DARPA researchers surveyed a set of soldiers and robotics scientists about the military roles
they thought humanoid-type robots would take over in the near future. The military officers predicted
that the first functions that would be turned over to robots would be countermine operations, then
reconnaissance, forward observer, logistics, and then infantry. Among the last they thought would be
turned over to autonomous robots would be air defense, driving or piloting vehicles, and food service.
This is somewhat surprising, given that these latter functions have been among the first to already be
robot-sourced, as well as that soldiers on average thought G.I. Joe would be replaced by robots before
Cookie the chef. Special forces roles were felt, on average, to be the least likely to ever be turned over
to robots.
Your highlight at location 2567
For these reasons scientists already see the day coming at which surgeons, who may require the most
years of training of all professions, will be replaced by robotic surgery systems like the da Vinci. Rod
Brooks of MIT and iRobot predicts that the future for doctors is likely to be the same as for airline pilots:
There mainly to appease the patient and regulatory boards and charge exorbitant amounts for skills
they rarely use and knowledge that the computer can call up faster and in more depth.
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To work well together, these robots and human soldiers will also need to have confidence in each other.
It sounds funny to say that about the relationship between a bucket of bolts and a human, but David
Bruemmer at the Idaho National Lab actually specializes in how humans and robots work together.
Without irony, he states that “trust is a huge issue for robot performance.”
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The outcome is that major changes in warfare are being driven by the last people you might associate
with combat. When you meet robot scientists, you quickly discover that it is hard to make blanket
assessments. They range from prototypical geeks wearing actual pocket protectors to brawny he-men,
who look like they spend more time at Gold’s Gym than at the lab. While many are introverts, others are
real jokers. At one research visit, for example, I watched a scientist ride a prototype military ground robot
down a set of stairs like a surf board. The only general rule is that they are all breathtakingly smart.
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Today, Angle builds robots that he is quite happy to see get destroyed. “Getting a robot back, blown up,
is one of the more powerful experiences I’ve lived through,” he says. “Nothing could make it so clear that
we have just saved lives. Somebody’s son is still alive. Some parent didn’t just get a call.”
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McKenna is especially proud of having funded the graduate student who now runs the “Blue Brain”
project in Switzerland. In collaboration with IBM, the project is trying to make a simulated brain using a
Blue Gene supercomputer, which might yield massive jumps in computing power and ultimately create
strong AI.
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By scrutinizing a pitcher’s fingers with a high-power lens, they can even predict whether he is going to
throw a fastball or a curve.
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By comparison, the government often has a relatively poor track record when it comes to predicting the
future. For example, in 1913, the U.S. government actually prosecuted Lee de Forest of RCA for telling
investors that his company would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic Ocean.
The idea seemed so absurd to the government that de Forest was assumed to be a swindler. Indeed,
Philip Tetlock, in his award-winning study Expert Political Judgment, found that the professional “experts”
who advise government are actually more often wrong in their predictions than right.
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As a 2006 article in Armed Forces Journal, one of the leading magazines for U.S. military officers, notes,
“We don’t do well, historically, in predicting the location and nature of the next war.” For example, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story in 1914, just before World War I
started. Entitled “Danger,” it warned that the new invention of submarines might be used to sink
merchant ships. The Royal Navy’s Admiralty actually went public to refute and mock Conan Doyle,
saying that “no nation would permit it and the officer who did it would be shot.” Just seven months later,
the passenger ship Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat, inaugurating the era of submarine
warfare. Part of the reason for this pattern is that while science fiction looks forward, the military typically
plans what the next war will look like by looking back at how it fought the last one. In discussing how the
American army that invaded Iraq in 2003 planned for it to be a repeat...
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Japan’s traditional religion of Shintoism holds that both animate and inanimate objects, from rocks to
trees to robots, have a spirit or soul just like a person. Thus, to endow a robot with a soul is not an
illogical leap in either fiction or reality. Indeed, in many Japanese factories, robots are given Shinto rites
and treated like members of the staff. Masahiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
explains that Buddhism also makes for a more soulful approach to what a westerner would see as just a
tool or maybe a mechanical servant. Mori, who wrote a book called The Buddha in the Robot, argues
that robots can have a Buddha-like nature and that humans should relate to them as they would a
person. “If you make something, your heart will go into the thing you are making. So, a robot is an
external self. If a robot is an external self, a robot is your child.”
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It is also interesting to note that Dyson was the inspiration for the “Dyson” character in the Terminator
movies, who invents the Skynet program, the AI gone mad that ultimately launches a nuclear holocaust
on humanity, and later dies trying to destroy it.
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when authentic experts in information technology examined the situation, they actually found a huge
difference between the theories of networking and the reality in the field. Joshua Davis is a
correspondent from Wired magazine, published in the Silicon Valley cyber-culture that had so excited
the Pentagon’s network-centric crowd. As he recounts of embedding with U.S. forces during the
invasion, “What I discovered was something entirely different from the shiny picture of techno-
supremacy touted by the proponents of the Rumsfeld doctrine. I found an unsung corps of geeks
improvising as they went, cobbling together a remarkable system from a hodgepodge of military-built
networking technology, off-the-shelf gear, miles of Ethernet cable, and commercial software. And during
two weeks in the war zone, I never heard anyone mention the ‘revolution in military affairs.’ ”
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In late 2006, over two hundred of the top thinkers and leaders in American security policy gathered for a
discussion on “Rethinking the U.S. Military Revolution.” Held in a Washington, D.C., conference center,
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More notable is what the gathered leaders and experts didn’t talk about. At this session, exclusively
focused on what was revolutionary in war today and tomorrow, robotics and other unmanned
technologies never came up, not even in a passing mention. The network-centric buzzword of
“transformation” was used twenty-one times, despite the fact that by late 2006 it was clear that the
advantages promised by its originators had not played out as expected. But words like “unmanned” or
“robot” were never spoken, not even once.
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John Pike of the Global Security organization puts it into this broad historic context. “First, you had
human beings without machines. Then, you had human beings with machines. And, finally you have
machines without human beings.” Security analyst Christopher Coker comments, “We now stand on the
cusp of post-human history.”
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Electronic devices can’t just be jammed or fried; they can also be hacked or even hijacked, with the
enemy taking over to make the system do whatever it wants. In a U.S. Army journal article, Ralph Peters
described how future wars would also include electronic “battles of conviction,” in which opposing
combat systems struggle to “convince” each other’s electronics to do things their own side doesn’t want.
“Robot, drive yourself off a cliff.” Or, even worse, “Robot, recode all American soldiers and civilians as
enemy combatants. Authorized to fire at will.”
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Advancement theory seeks to explain not only how change occurs in various fields from fashion to
science, but also how brilliant people can do something that makes no sense to 99 percent of the
population at the time, but then later on seems like pure genius. The classic example from music would
be Lou Reed, the guitarist and principal singer-songwriter of the band the Velvet Underground. The
band was little known during its lifetime (1965-73), but was the seed from which all of alternative music
grew. If there was no Lou Reed, there would have been no punk rock, no glam rock, no grunge, no indie
rock, no emo, or whatever genre is popular as you read this now. But even within this influence, Reed
would repeatedly surprise the world with things that only seemed to indicate he had gone off the deep
end, but would later prove brilliant. His perhaps greatest moment of “advancement” was in 1986, when
he released the song “The Original Wrapper.” Before either hip-hop music or the terrible disease were...
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By contrast, the United States and Europe have faced slowing population growth, and the accompanying
need for young workers, by opening their borders to greater numbers of immigrants. But Japan, with a
population that is 99 percent ethnically pure Japanese, has decided to go the technologic route, with
robots used for everything from farming and construction to nursing and elder care.
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he attended the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which hosted some twenty-two million people and put
the Japanese robotics trend on full display. “My choice may be particularly surprising, given that Japan’s
economy has been dragging for the last 25 or more years, in spite of everything that the Japanese
government has tried. So why am I now putting my money on Japan?... It is because of robots!” Dave
Sonntag agrees. “Japan is top-notch in robotics. . . . They have not even begun to realize their strategic
potentials.”
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Just as China’s growing Internet presence gives it new capabilities in information warfare (the Chinese
army has set up a “cyberwarfare” program staffed by some six thousand paid hackers), this growing
unmanned research and commercial sector creates new potential in the military domain.
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Qiao and Wang argue that America suffers from an odd combination of being uniquely addicted to
technology, but also unable to truly exploit it. “However, this is not a strong point of the Americans, who
are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary
where technology has not yet reached.” Moreover, they go on to describe how the United States may be
ahead now, but this will not last for long. “Technology is useful, however, because Americans do not do
a good job of anticipating technology trends.”
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“The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished
at the fact that commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with which to
engage in war.” They go on to add, “We believe that some morning people will awake to discover with
surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.”
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it isn’t that American kids are dumb. Rather, our education system is making them dumber. “The longer
students are exposed to our K-12 education system, the worse they do—particularly in the critical areas
of math and science.” Indeed, while U.S. fourth graders come in at the top eightieth percentile in the
world in science, by the time they reach the twelfth grade they have fallen to the bottom fifth percentile.
To paraphrase the failed Bush education reform policy, which worsened the problem by emphasizing
rote memorization, nearly every American child is being left behind. As Bill Gates puts it, “When I
compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I’m terrified for our workforce of
tomorrow.” The traditional retort to rising worries about America’s education system is that while our high
schools may suck, we have great universities. Unfortunately, when it comes to math and science skills,
so key to designing, building, and using new technologies, this may no longer...
Your highlight at location 4862
“Moneyball way,” after Beane was profiled in a book entitled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair
Game).
Your highlight at location 4862
“Moneyball way,” after Beane was profiled in a book entitled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair
Game).
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new ideas still have trouble supplanting old doctrines. This especially happens with new technologies.
Just because something new and better is discovered doesn’t always mean it is adopted.
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Throughout history, even the most brilliant military minds have often failed to adapt well to new
technologies. Napoleon may have conquered most of Europe, but he turned down Robert Fulton’s offer
to make France both submarines and steam-ships. At the very start of the American Civil War, the Union
army was offered the breech-loading repeater rifle, which could fire seven shots quickly instead of just
one. But its makers couldn’t even get a hearing, let alone a sale; it wasn’t until President Lincoln himself
tried out the weapon that the rifles were bought, years into the war, and then only for cavalry. The same
thing happened with machine guns.
Your highlight at location 4883
Custer could have had four Gatling guns with him at the Battle of Little Bighorn, which would have
mowed down the Indians at his “Last Stand.” Instead, Custer left them behind at the base as he felt
machine guns had no value in combat and would only slow him down.
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General Hamilton Hawkins lamented the “foolish and unjustified discarding of horses” and blamed the
“sheep-like rush to mechanization and motorization without clear thinking or any apparent ability to
visualize what takes place on the field of maneuver or the battlefield.” Even with mechanized vehicles
clearly proving themselves in World War II, the U.S. Army didn’t dissolve its last horse unit until three
years into the war.
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the reason the air force resisted systems like the unmanned fighter plane is that “no fighter pilot is ever
going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a U.A.V....Fighter pilots don’t want to be replaced.”
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One A-10 Warthog pilot, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said fliers’ biggest fear—being shot down—
has been replaced by a fear of being ordered to fly a drone from a ground-based cubicle. “It’s like being
a pilot for nerds. Where is the sense of adventure, the sense of danger?...Let’s put it this way: I don’t
think they’re going to make any movies about guys who fly Predators.”
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One young air force officer, just months out of the academy, tells how, despite the fact that drone pilots
have seen far more combat action than jet fighter pilots over the last decade, “It’s seen as this geeky
thing to do.”
Highlights:
Your highlight at location 378
As the chief wrote, “When a robot dies, you don’t have to write a letter to its mother.”
Your highlight at location 763
One of the early scares in the war on terrorism was the rash of letters carrying deadly anthrax powder
sent to prominent officials and media. Some of the powder also leaked out inside post offices. Since
those attacks, some one thousand robots have been installed to sort parcels, with the U.S. Postal
Service planning to add as many as eighty thousand more.
Your highlight at location 764
Some of the powder also leaked out inside post offices. Since those attacks, some one thousand robots
have been installed to sort parcels, with the U.S. Postal Service planning to add as many as eighty
thousand more.
Your highlight at location 1036
Among his current projects is one for the Department of Transportation on “how to get the driver out of
the car and save lives.” Finkelstein is optimistic that this will happen “certainly in the range of 2015-
2030."
Your highlight at location 1163
At a congressional hearing on February 8, 2000, it finally all came together for military robotics on the
“demand” side. Senator John Warner from Virginia, the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, laid down a gauntlet, mandating into the Pentagon’s budget that by 2010, one-third of all the
aircraft designed to attack behind enemy lines be unmanned, and that by 2015, one-third of all ground
combat vehicles be driverless.
Your highlight at location 1228
The more the military used unmanned systems, the more people came to believe that machines brought
certain advantages to the battlefield. “They don’t get hungry,” says Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s
Joint Forces Command. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy
next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Your highlight at location 1232
For example, with aerial refueling, spy planes are now able to stay in flight for as long as twenty hours or
more. And yet the air force has found that humans lose effectiveness after ten to twelve hours. They
simply wear down physically and psychologically from doing the same task that long. Unmanned
systems, by contrast, don’t need to sleep, don’t need to eat, and find monitoring empty desert sands as
exciting as partying at the Playboy Mansion. As one unmanned plane advertisement put it, “Can you
keep your eyes open for thirty hours without blinking?”
Your highlight at location 1243
Even then, there are other kinds of dirty that robots may be more apt for. As an air force captain
comments, things as simple as “inclement weather, smog, and smoke can hinder pilot visibility. How is
this different between a manned and unmanned aircraft? The UAV has EO/IR/SARS [electro-optical,
infrared, and synthetic-aperture radar sensors] to rely on. The pilot has the Mark I Eyeball.”
Your highlight at location 1250
It could maneuver so fast and hard that its pilots blacked out.”
Your highlight at location 1257
Automobile crash avoidance technologies illustrate that a digital system can recognize a danger and
react in about the same time that the human driver can only get to mid-curse word.
Your highlight at location 1266
A computer, by contrast, can share that skill or knowledge with another computer or robot in only the
time that it takes to download the software file.
Your highlight at location 1278
a new mandate in the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the Defense Department budget.
Congress ordered the Pentagon to show a “preference for joint unmanned systems in acquisition
programs for new systems, including a requirement under any such program for the development of a
manned system for a certification that an unmanned system is incapable of meeting program
requirements.” If the U.S. military was going to buy a new weapon, it would now have to justify why it was
not a robotic one.
Your highlight at location 1467
Autonomy, then, relates to many of the same questions that we usually use to define a human being’s
maturity.
Your highlight at location 1532
Overall, the size of the AI market was estimated by the Business Communications Company to be
roughly $21 billion in 2007 with annual growth of 12.2 percent.
Your highlight at location 1535
Up until today, each of the functions of war took place within the human body and mind. The warrior’s
eyes saw the target, their brain identified it as a threat, and then it told their hands where to direct the
weapon, be it a sword or rifle or missile. Now each of these tasks is being outsourced to the machine.
For this reason, the U.S. military funds as much as 80 percent of all AI research in the United States.
Thus, while firms like Microsoft or Google lead and the military follows in other parts of the information
technology world, the military sets the agenda in AI.
Your highlight at location 1574
“five senses” (and yes, there are electronic taste and smell sensors that can even identify wines and
cheeses as well as most sommeliers),
Your highlight at location 1646
the LRAD puts out what soldiers affectionately call “the brown sound.” That is, it sends acoustic waves in
such frequencies that they overwhelm the human body and even make a targeted person defecate
upon themselves. The devices have a range of up to one kilometer. The LRAD actually made its first
combat debut not with the military but on a vacation cruise ship. In 2005, one of the Seaborne line’s
luxury ships was attacked off Somalia by pirates armed with machine guns and rockets. Instead of
fighting them off with shuffleboard sticks, the crew used LRAD sonic blasters to chase them away.
Your highlight at location 1657
One already tested out in Iraq is the Active Denial System. Sometimes called the “pain ray,” the system
shoots out waves like those used to heat up frozen pizza in a microwave oven. The rays, which have a
range of over five football fields, penetrate the top sixty-fourth layer of skin (even if you are wearing
clothes over the skin) and heat up the water inside. The ray doesn’t permanently hurt the person, or
even cause a sunburn. But the sensation is excruciating, enough to make test subjects feel like their
skin was catching on fire. If the ray is turned off, or the person moves out of its focus, the pain instantly
ends.
Your highlight at location 1706
using rechargeable batteries in some way, such as through an electrical hookup, or even through an
infrared beam, as the Roomba uses.
Your highlight at location 1726
At the University of Texas, researchers have built a tiny fuel cell that draws electricity from the glucose-
oxygen reaction in human blood. It is called a “vampire-bot.” A group of Japanese scientists working on
a similar project found that such systems could draw about 100 watts, equal to a bright lightbulb, from
the blood of one human being.
Your highlight at location 1795
DARPA even employs a self-described “combat zoologist,” who describes his job as “getting robots to
jump, run, crawl, do things that nature does well. We’re evolving our machines to be more like animals.”
Your highlight at location 1814
As one said, “Fact of nature: There are no large land creatures with six legs and there never have
been.”
Your highlight at location 1911
When something is moving at an “exponential” pace, it grows faster and faster each time it gets bigger.
A familiar example is the idea of compound interest. Imagine a genie offers you the choice of either $1
million today or a magic penny that doubles in value every day for one month. The obvious choice would
seem to be to take the $1 million. But that would actually be the sucker’s play. Because of the
exponential growth, the penny would be worth $10 million at the end of that month.
Your highlight at location 1962
This convergence of exponential trends is why technologic change, especially for electronics, comes not
only quicker, but in bundles, rather than staying within one category. While microchip performance is
now doubling roughly every eighteen months and storage every fifteen months, we are also seeing
similar acceleration in categories far and wide. Wireless capacity doubles every nine months. Optical
capacity doubles every twelve months. The cost/performance ratio of Internet service providers is
doubling every twelve months. Internet bandwidth backbone is doubling roughly every twelve months.
The number of human genes mapped per year doubles every eighteen months. The resolution of brain
scans (a key to understanding how the brain works, an important part of creating strong AI) doubles
every twelve months. And, as a by-product, the number of personal and service robots has so far
doubled every nine months.
Your highlight at location 2009
If Moore’s law continues to play out, some pretty amazing advancements will happen that will shape the
world of robots and war. By 2029, $1,000 computers would do twenty million billion calculations a
second, equivalent to what a thousand brains can do. This means that the sum total of human
brainpower would be less than 1 percent of all the thinking power on the globe.
Your highlight at location 2012
Hugo de Garis, the head of the StarBrain AI project, has written a cheerily titled article on this entitled
“Building Gods or Building Our Potential Exterminators?” In it he writes, “Within a single human
generation, it will very probably be possible to store a single bit of information on a single atom.” If this
proves true, an object the size of a disc then would be able to hold a trillion trillion (a 1 with twenty-four
zeros after it) bits of information. By comparison, the human brain is created from a genome of roughly
twenty-three million bits of information. If computers can match this almost incomprehensible processing
speed with such amazing memory, the advantage that human brains have of being so parallel starts to
fall by the wayside.
Your highlight at location 2094
Dreyfus is a noted philosopher at the University of California-Berkeley, located in the heart of Singularity
fandom. In 1967, he famously predicted that no computer would ever beat him at chess. It turns out he
wasn’t the greatest of players and lost to a computer in his first and only match soon after. Dreyfus, who
went on to author the 1972 book What Computers Can’t Do, was undeterred. He revised his prediction
to say that a computer would never be able to beat a skilled chess player, a nationally ranked player. A
computer soon did. When that happened, he revised his prediction again (as well as his book title, which
in 1992 was reissued as What Computers Still Can’t Do), claiming that while computers may be able to
beat most humans, they would never be able to beat the very best, such as the world champion
chessmaster. Of course, this then happened in 1997 with IBM’s Deep Blue.
Your highlight at location 2258
Spartan Scout had stopped. As one report put it, “The civilian sailors were somewhat taken aback when
they were interrogated by this Arab speaking boat that had no one aboard.”
Your highlight at location 2290
Among the planes being made at the military’s flight test center near Groom Lake, Nevada, better known
as Area 51, is the Lockheed Martin “Polecat.” Described as looking like “a B-2 bomber’s chick,” the
bomber drone is made of only two hundred parts that are glued, rather than riveted, together to
increase its stealthiness. It will be rigged up with “a fully autonomous flight control and mission-handling
system,” meaning it will be able to carry out its mission from takeoff to landing without any human
instruction. Lockheed Martin claims its studies show Polecat to be five times more survivable and
mission-effective than the air force’s plans for a manned bomber version of its new F-22 fighter jet.
Your highlight at location 2372
It costs roughly $9,100 a pound to launch anything into space with the Space Shuttle. So if a system is
to be manned, the humans and each and every pound of water, food, and oxygen tanks to keep them
alive are expensive to send. Likewise, manned systems in space are incredibly vulnerable (one bullet or
laser hole and there goes all the air). Instead, the United States has already started work on a number
of unmanned systems for potential use in space.
Your highlight at location 2511
Perhaps most telling is a report that Joint Forces Command drew up in 2005, which suggested that
autonomous robots on the battlefield will be the norm within twenty years. Its title was somewhat
amusing, given the official mantra one usually hears on the issue: “Unmanned Effects: Taking the
Human Out of the Loop.” So, despite what one article called “all the lip service paid to keeping a human
in the loop,” autonomous armed robots are coming to war. They simply make too much sense to the
people that matter. A special operations forces officer put it this way: “That’s exactly the kind of thing
that scares the shit out of me.... But we are on the pathway already. It’s inevitable.”
Your highlight at location 2543
In 2004, DARPA researchers surveyed a set of soldiers and robotics scientists about the military roles
they thought humanoid-type robots would take over in the near future. The military officers predicted
that the first functions that would be turned over to robots would be countermine operations, then
reconnaissance, forward observer, logistics, and then infantry. Among the last they thought would be
turned over to autonomous robots would be air defense, driving or piloting vehicles, and food service.
This is somewhat surprising, given that these latter functions have been among the first to already be
robot-sourced, as well as that soldiers on average thought G.I. Joe would be replaced by robots before
Cookie the chef. Special forces roles were felt, on average, to be the least likely to ever be turned over
to robots.
Your highlight at location 2567
For these reasons scientists already see the day coming at which surgeons, who may require the most
years of training of all professions, will be replaced by robotic surgery systems like the da Vinci. Rod
Brooks of MIT and iRobot predicts that the future for doctors is likely to be the same as for airline pilots:
There mainly to appease the patient and regulatory boards and charge exorbitant amounts for skills
they rarely use and knowledge that the computer can call up faster and in more depth.
Your highlight at location 2619
To work well together, these robots and human soldiers will also need to have confidence in each other.
It sounds funny to say that about the relationship between a bucket of bolts and a human, but David
Bruemmer at the Idaho National Lab actually specializes in how humans and robots work together.
Without irony, he states that “trust is a huge issue for robot performance.”
Your highlight at location 2699
The outcome is that major changes in warfare are being driven by the last people you might associate
with combat. When you meet robot scientists, you quickly discover that it is hard to make blanket
assessments. They range from prototypical geeks wearing actual pocket protectors to brawny he-men,
who look like they spend more time at Gold’s Gym than at the lab. While many are introverts, others are
real jokers. At one research visit, for example, I watched a scientist ride a prototype military ground robot
down a set of stairs like a surf board. The only general rule is that they are all breathtakingly smart.
Your highlight at location 2715
Today, Angle builds robots that he is quite happy to see get destroyed. “Getting a robot back, blown up,
is one of the more powerful experiences I’ve lived through,” he says. “Nothing could make it so clear that
we have just saved lives. Somebody’s son is still alive. Some parent didn’t just get a call.”
Your highlight at location 2788
McKenna is especially proud of having funded the graduate student who now runs the “Blue Brain”
project in Switzerland. In collaboration with IBM, the project is trying to make a simulated brain using a
Blue Gene supercomputer, which might yield massive jumps in computing power and ultimately create
strong AI.
Your highlight at location 2804
By scrutinizing a pitcher’s fingers with a high-power lens, they can even predict whether he is going to
throw a fastball or a curve.
Your highlight at location 3072
By comparison, the government often has a relatively poor track record when it comes to predicting the
future. For example, in 1913, the U.S. government actually prosecuted Lee de Forest of RCA for telling
investors that his company would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic Ocean.
The idea seemed so absurd to the government that de Forest was assumed to be a swindler. Indeed,
Philip Tetlock, in his award-winning study Expert Political Judgment, found that the professional “experts”
who advise government are actually more often wrong in their predictions than right.
Your highlight at location 3078
As a 2006 article in Armed Forces Journal, one of the leading magazines for U.S. military officers, notes,
“We don’t do well, historically, in predicting the location and nature of the next war.” For example, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story in 1914, just before World War I
started. Entitled “Danger,” it warned that the new invention of submarines might be used to sink
merchant ships. The Royal Navy’s Admiralty actually went public to refute and mock Conan Doyle,
saying that “no nation would permit it and the officer who did it would be shot.” Just seven months later,
the passenger ship Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat, inaugurating the era of submarine
warfare. Part of the reason for this pattern is that while science fiction looks forward, the military typically
plans what the next war will look like by looking back at how it fought the last one. In discussing how the
American army that invaded Iraq in 2003 planned for it to be a repeat...
Your highlight at location 3269
Japan’s traditional religion of Shintoism holds that both animate and inanimate objects, from rocks to
trees to robots, have a spirit or soul just like a person. Thus, to endow a robot with a soul is not an
illogical leap in either fiction or reality. Indeed, in many Japanese factories, robots are given Shinto rites
and treated like members of the staff. Masahiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
explains that Buddhism also makes for a more soulful approach to what a westerner would see as just a
tool or maybe a mechanical servant. Mori, who wrote a book called The Buddha in the Robot, argues
that robots can have a Buddha-like nature and that humans should relate to them as they would a
person. “If you make something, your heart will go into the thing you are making. So, a robot is an
external self. If a robot is an external self, a robot is your child.”
Your highlight at location 3397
It is also interesting to note that Dyson was the inspiration for the “Dyson” character in the Terminator
movies, who invents the Skynet program, the AI gone mad that ultimately launches a nuclear holocaust
on humanity, and later dies trying to destroy it.
Your highlight at location 3661
when authentic experts in information technology examined the situation, they actually found a huge
difference between the theories of networking and the reality in the field. Joshua Davis is a
correspondent from Wired magazine, published in the Silicon Valley cyber-culture that had so excited
the Pentagon’s network-centric crowd. As he recounts of embedding with U.S. forces during the
invasion, “What I discovered was something entirely different from the shiny picture of techno-
supremacy touted by the proponents of the Rumsfeld doctrine. I found an unsung corps of geeks
improvising as they went, cobbling together a remarkable system from a hodgepodge of military-built
networking technology, off-the-shelf gear, miles of Ethernet cable, and commercial software. And during
two weeks in the war zone, I never heard anyone mention the ‘revolution in military affairs.’ ”
Your highlight at location 3686
In late 2006, over two hundred of the top thinkers and leaders in American security policy gathered for a
discussion on “Rethinking the U.S. Military Revolution.” Held in a Washington, D.C., conference center,
Your highlight at location 3691
More notable is what the gathered leaders and experts didn’t talk about. At this session, exclusively
focused on what was revolutionary in war today and tomorrow, robotics and other unmanned
technologies never came up, not even in a passing mention. The network-centric buzzword of
“transformation” was used twenty-one times, despite the fact that by late 2006 it was clear that the
advantages promised by its originators had not played out as expected. But words like “unmanned” or
“robot” were never spoken, not even once.
Your highlight at location 3749
John Pike of the Global Security organization puts it into this broad historic context. “First, you had
human beings without machines. Then, you had human beings with machines. And, finally you have
machines without human beings.” Security analyst Christopher Coker comments, “We now stand on the
cusp of post-human history.”
Your highlight at location 3874
Electronic devices can’t just be jammed or fried; they can also be hacked or even hijacked, with the
enemy taking over to make the system do whatever it wants. In a U.S. Army journal article, Ralph Peters
described how future wars would also include electronic “battles of conviction,” in which opposing
combat systems struggle to “convince” each other’s electronics to do things their own side doesn’t want.
“Robot, drive yourself off a cliff.” Or, even worse, “Robot, recode all American soldiers and civilians as
enemy combatants. Authorized to fire at will.”
Your highlight at location 3959
Advancement theory seeks to explain not only how change occurs in various fields from fashion to
science, but also how brilliant people can do something that makes no sense to 99 percent of the
population at the time, but then later on seems like pure genius. The classic example from music would
be Lou Reed, the guitarist and principal singer-songwriter of the band the Velvet Underground. The
band was little known during its lifetime (1965-73), but was the seed from which all of alternative music
grew. If there was no Lou Reed, there would have been no punk rock, no glam rock, no grunge, no indie
rock, no emo, or whatever genre is popular as you read this now. But even within this influence, Reed
would repeatedly surprise the world with things that only seemed to indicate he had gone off the deep
end, but would later prove brilliant. His perhaps greatest moment of “advancement” was in 1986, when
he released the song “The Original Wrapper.” Before either hip-hop music or the terrible disease were...
Your highlight at location 4701
By contrast, the United States and Europe have faced slowing population growth, and the accompanying
need for young workers, by opening their borders to greater numbers of immigrants. But Japan, with a
population that is 99 percent ethnically pure Japanese, has decided to go the technologic route, with
robots used for everything from farming and construction to nursing and elder care.
Your highlight at location 4709
he attended the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, which hosted some twenty-two million people and put
the Japanese robotics trend on full display. “My choice may be particularly surprising, given that Japan’s
economy has been dragging for the last 25 or more years, in spite of everything that the Japanese
government has tried. So why am I now putting my money on Japan?... It is because of robots!” Dave
Sonntag agrees. “Japan is top-notch in robotics. . . . They have not even begun to realize their strategic
potentials.”
Your highlight at location 4756
Just as China’s growing Internet presence gives it new capabilities in information warfare (the Chinese
army has set up a “cyberwarfare” program staffed by some six thousand paid hackers), this growing
unmanned research and commercial sector creates new potential in the military domain.
Your highlight at location 4783
Qiao and Wang argue that America suffers from an odd combination of being uniquely addicted to
technology, but also unable to truly exploit it. “However, this is not a strong point of the Americans, who
are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably halt their thinking at the boundary
where technology has not yet reached.” Moreover, they go on to describe how the United States may be
ahead now, but this will not last for long. “Technology is useful, however, because Americans do not do
a good job of anticipating technology trends.”
Your highlight at location 4789
“The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished
at the fact that commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with which to
engage in war.” They go on to add, “We believe that some morning people will awake to discover with
surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to have offensive and lethal characteristics.”
Your highlight at location 4805
it isn’t that American kids are dumb. Rather, our education system is making them dumber. “The longer
students are exposed to our K-12 education system, the worse they do—particularly in the critical areas
of math and science.” Indeed, while U.S. fourth graders come in at the top eightieth percentile in the
world in science, by the time they reach the twelfth grade they have fallen to the bottom fifth percentile.
To paraphrase the failed Bush education reform policy, which worsened the problem by emphasizing
rote memorization, nearly every American child is being left behind. As Bill Gates puts it, “When I
compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I’m terrified for our workforce of
tomorrow.” The traditional retort to rising worries about America’s education system is that while our high
schools may suck, we have great universities. Unfortunately, when it comes to math and science skills,
so key to designing, building, and using new technologies, this may no longer...
Your highlight at location 4862
“Moneyball way,” after Beane was profiled in a book entitled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair
Game).
Your highlight at location 4862
“Moneyball way,” after Beane was profiled in a book entitled Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair
Game).
Your highlight at location 4868
new ideas still have trouble supplanting old doctrines. This especially happens with new technologies.
Just because something new and better is discovered doesn’t always mean it is adopted.
Your highlight at location 4877
Throughout history, even the most brilliant military minds have often failed to adapt well to new
technologies. Napoleon may have conquered most of Europe, but he turned down Robert Fulton’s offer
to make France both submarines and steam-ships. At the very start of the American Civil War, the Union
army was offered the breech-loading repeater rifle, which could fire seven shots quickly instead of just
one. But its makers couldn’t even get a hearing, let alone a sale; it wasn’t until President Lincoln himself
tried out the weapon that the rifles were bought, years into the war, and then only for cavalry. The same
thing happened with machine guns.
Your highlight at location 4883
Custer could have had four Gatling guns with him at the Battle of Little Bighorn, which would have
mowed down the Indians at his “Last Stand.” Instead, Custer left them behind at the base as he felt
machine guns had no value in combat and would only slow him down.
Your highlight at location 4895
General Hamilton Hawkins lamented the “foolish and unjustified discarding of horses” and blamed the
“sheep-like rush to mechanization and motorization without clear thinking or any apparent ability to
visualize what takes place on the field of maneuver or the battlefield.” Even with mechanized vehicles
clearly proving themselves in World War II, the U.S. Army didn’t dissolve its last horse unit until three
years into the war.
Your highlight at location 4903
the reason the air force resisted systems like the unmanned fighter plane is that “no fighter pilot is ever
going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a U.A.V....Fighter pilots don’t want to be replaced.”
Your highlight at location 4905
One A-10 Warthog pilot, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, said fliers’ biggest fear—being shot down—
has been replaced by a fear of being ordered to fly a drone from a ground-based cubicle. “It’s like being
a pilot for nerds. Where is the sense of adventure, the sense of danger?...Let’s put it this way: I don’t
think they’re going to make any movies about guys who fly Predators.”
Your highlight at location 4920
One young air force officer, just months out of the academy, tells how, despite the fact that drone pilots
have seen far more combat action than jet fighter pilots over the last decade, “It’s seen as this geeky
thing to do.”
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