Robotics

Since Robby the Robot first appeared in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet”, science fiction in print, film and on television has pushed the limits of our imagination regarding machines of the future and their abilities to perform human tasks. From Star Wars to Robot Warriors, our glimpse at the potential of tomorrow has sometimes been rather an eye-opener. The word robot was introduced to the public by Czeck writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. in 1921. Robots are of course intended to be labor saving devices, machines designed, constructed, and operated to relieve human drudgery, and in many cases danger. We’ve all seen pictures of the police bomb squad robots on the TV News. I doubt anyone would debate the value of such a machine, or of the newer high-hazard firefighting version. Robots are already common in many industrial applications, preforming mind numbing repetive work, particularly at jobs requiring considerable physical strength and/or high precision. Your new car was probably built in part by a robot, as were the circuit boards in your home electronic equipment. You can even buy a robot vacuum cleaner for your home on the open market.

But robots have other applications as well. Most people have seen the rather frightening opening scenes of the movie “Terminator”, where robotic fighting machines battle the few remaining humans for control of a devastated Earth. The movie is futuristic science fiction of course… but the future may be closer than you think. Broadly defined, military robots date back to the WWII era in the form of German “Goliath” mobile mines and Soviet “Teletanks”. Essentially these were simple remotely controlled weapons with limited effectiveness and made little impact on warfare. The V-1 and V-2 missiles were slightly more properly called robotic devices, as when fired they automatically went (in theory) where they were programmed to go. “Smart Bombs” and “Smart Missiles” are more of the same, rather dim-witted robots that usually go where they’re told, and do what they’re supposed to do. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan military robots have suddenly become much more than a historical footnote, and their development has advanced rapidly. Defense contractors are currently hard at work developing autonomous "robot soldiers" of various types, with most of these machines presently looking more like trucks or mini-tanks that human soldiers. They also have problems with threat recognition, as most can’t seem to recognize guerillas crouched behind an obstacle or even who the friendly soldiers are, but some are quite happy to shoot at anything with an AK-47 silhouette painted on it.

Today’s engineers can build nearly anything the human mind can envision, and nearly any machine can be automated and armed. The problem (and major R&D efforts) with today’s robotic weapons systems revolves around the sensor systems and computer controls, along with the artificial intelligence software they require to become fully autonomous. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that part of computer science devoted to creating “expert systems”, machines that can engage in behavior that humans would consider “intelligently guided”. Researchers are creating systems which can mimic human thought, understand speech, and many other tricks never before possible. AI is a step that can be quite helpful to humanity, in that machines can do dangerous or repetitive jobs that require detailed instructions and mental alertness. AI, with its learning capabilities, can accomplish those tasks but only if we are ready to allow this to happen. In theory the more use we get of machines the less work is required by us. This in turn leads to fewer injured workers (or soldiers) and far less stress to the humans involved. AI can be quite a blessing to human endeavor. With all that, I am quite a fan of Robots and AI, as long as we know what we’re doing…

We need to be prepared for the worst of AI as well. Something this new and revolutionary is sure to have many kinks that will need to be worked out. There are many things that can go wrong with any new system so we must be as prepared as we can for this new technology. Computer programs this complex include millions of lines of code and are not written by any individual programmer, but rather by teams of professionals, none of whom know the entire program. Accordingly, no individual can predict how the various portions of large programs will work together without extensive field testing, an option that may well be deliberately sidestepped in the press of military requirements and an industrial “rush to market”.

For the moment, US Mechatronics has produced a working automated sentry gun system and is currently developing it for commercial, police, and military use. Scientists at MIT are "looking into building a mechanical super-fighter... able to heal his own wounds, leap buildings, deflect bullets and even become invisible" which "won't be ready for at least 10 years." The U.S. Joint Forces Command "Project Alpha" envisioned a 2025 fighting force that 'is largely robotic', taking humans out of the loop for the most part. AI programmers appear to be in a pell-mell rush to “field something” irregardless of it’s reliability. That sense of haste among designers has been increased by a congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.

Still, a note of sanity is creeping into the robotic revolution. Autonomous military robots must be programmed to live by a strict military credo or we risk untold horrors at their steel hands. This warning, which includes a Terminator type scenario where robots turn on their human masters, is contained in a report funded by the US Navy’s high-tech Office of Naval Research. The report foresees an era where robots are smart enough to make crucial battlefield decisions, and eventually display “significant advantages over human soldiers”. Robots don’t get tired, they don’t go on strike, they don’t have to be paid, and they can be designed to do almost anything. Best of all from the government’s view is that they don’t have to be convinced as to who the enemy is… they just attack whoever they’re told to attack. If a government pulls a really raw deal on its citizens, a robot army won’t mutiny, it would just continue to defend the government from all comers. ‘Course a simple computer glitch, a stray virus, or a malevolent hacker could do much the same thing…

The death and destruction of war is often the only thing that keeps nations from fighting. When we finally make warfare little more than a glorified auto race with machines fighting machines, that hesitation will all but disappear, and war will become even more common than it is today. Military robotics and artificial intelligence, like genetic engineering and stem cell research is here today, and it’s just one more facet of our high-tech world that we’ll have to get used to, like it or not. After all, once the genie is out of the bottle, we’re not going to get it back in, as much as we might like to. But we should demand that our leaders keep a very cautious eye on developments, and not necessarily depend on commercial hyperbole.