Military robots and the future of war | P.W. Singer

I thought I'd begin with a scene of war.

There was little to warn of the danger ahead.

The Iraqi insurgent had placed the IED,

an Improvised Explosive Device,

along the side of the road with great care.

By 2006, there were more than 2,500

of these attacks every single month,

and they were the leading cause of

casualties among American soldiers

and Iraqi civilians.

The team that was hunting for this IED

is called an EOD team—

Explosives Ordinance Disposal—and

they're the pointy end of the spear in the

American effort to suppress these roadside bombs.

Each EOD team goes out on about

600 of these bomb calls every year,

defusing about two bombs a day.

Perhaps the best sign of how valuable they

are to the war effort, is that

the Iraqi insurgents put a $50,000 bounty

on the head of a single EOD soldier.

Unfortunately, this particular call

would not end well.

By the time the soldier advanced close

enough to see the telltale wires

of the bomb, it exploded in a wave of flame.

Now, depending how close you are

and how much explosive has been packed

into that bomb, it can cause death

or injury. You have to be as far as

50 yards away to escape that.

The blast is so strong it can even break

your limbs, even if you're not hit.

That soldier had been on top of the bomb.

And so when the rest of the team advanced

they found little left. And that night the unit's

commander did a sad duty, and he wrote

a condolence letter back to the United

States, and he talked about how hard the

loss had been on his unit, about the fact

that they had lost their bravest soldier,

a soldier who had saved their lives

many a time.

And he apologized

for not being able to bring them home.

But then he talked up the silver lining

that he took away from the loss.

"At least," as he wrote, "when a robot dies,

you don't have to write a letter

to its mother."

That scene sounds like science fiction,

but is battlefield reality already.

The soldier in that case

was a 42-pound robot called a PackBot.

The chief's letter went, not to some

farmhouse in Iowa like you see

in the old war movies, but went to

the iRobot Company, which is

named after the Asimov novel

and the not-so-great Will Smith movie,

and... um... (Laughter)...

if you remember that

in that fictional world, robots started out

carrying out mundane chores, and then

they started taking on life-and-death decisions.

That's a reality we face today.

What we're going to do is actually just

flash a series of photos behind me that

show you the reality of robots used in war

right now or already at the prototype stage.

It's just to give you a taste.

Another way of putting it is you're not

going to see anything that's powered

by Vulcan technology, or teenage

wizard hormones or anything like that.

This is all real. So why don't we

go ahead and start those pictures.

Something big is going on in war today,

and maybe even the history of humanity

itself. The U.S. military went into Iraq with

a handful of drones in the air.

We now have 5,300.

We went in with zero unmanned ground

systems. We now have 12,000.

And the tech term "killer application"

takes on new meaning in this space.

And we need to remember that we're

talking about the Model T Fords,

the Wright Flyers, compared

to what's coming soon.

That's where we're at right now.

One of the people that I recently met with

was an Air Force three-star general, and he

said basically, where we're headed very

soon is tens of thousands of robots

operating in our conflicts, and these

numbers matter, because we're not just

talking about tens of thousands of today's

robots, but tens of thousands of these

prototypes and tomorrow's robots, because

of course, one of the things that's operating

in technology is Moore's Law,

that you can pack in more and more

computing power into those robots, and so

flash forward around 25 years,

if Moore's Law holds true,

those robots will be close to a billion times

more powerful in their computing than today.

And so what that means is the kind of

things that we used to only talk about at

science fiction conventions like Comic-Con

have to be talked about in the halls

of power and places like the Pentagon.

A robots revolution is upon us.

Now, I need to be clear here.

I'm not talking about a revolution where you

have to worry about the Governor of

California showing up at your door,

a la the Terminator. (Laughter)

When historians look at this period, they're

going to conclude that we're in a different

type of revolution: a revolution in war,

like the invention of the atomic bomb.

But it may be even bigger than that,

because our unmanned systems don't just

affect the "how" of war-fighting,

they affect the "who" of fighting

at its most fundamental level.

That is, every previous revolution in war, be

it the machine gun, be it the atomic bomb,

was about a system that either shot faster,

went further, had a bigger boom.

That's certainly the case with robotics, but

they also change the experience of the warrior

and even the very identity of the warrior.

Another way of putting this is that

mankind's 5,000-year-old monopoly

on the fighting of war is breaking down

in our very lifetime. I've spent

the last several years going around

meeting with all the players in this field,

from the robot scientists to the science

fiction authors who inspired them to the

19-year-old drone pilots who are fighting

from Nevada, to the four-star generals

who command them, to even the Iraqi

insurgents who they are targeting and what

they think about our systems, and

what I found interesting is not just

their stories, but how their experiences

point to these ripple effects that are going

outwards in our society, in our law

and our ethics, etc. And so what I'd like

to do with my remaining time is basically

flesh out a couple of these.

So the first is that the future of war,

even a robotics one, is not going to be

purely an American one.

The U.S. is currently ahead in military

robotics right now, but we know that in

technology there's no such thing as

a permanent first move or advantage.

In a quick show of hands, how many

people in this room still use

Wang Computers? (Laughter)

It's the same thing in war. The British and

the French invented the tank.

The Germans figured out how

to use it right, and so what we have to

think about for the U.S. is that we are

ahead right now, but you have

43 other countries out there

working on military robotics, and they

include all the interesting countries like

Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran.

And this raises a bigger worry for me.

How do we move forward in this revolution

given the state of our manufacturing

and the state of our science and

mathematics training in our schools?

Or another way of thinking about this is,

what does it mean to go to war increasingly

with soldiers whose hardware is made

in China and software is written in India?

But just as software has gone open-source,

so has warfare.

Unlike an aircraft carrier or an atomic bomb,

you don't need a massive manufacturing

system to build robotics. A lot of it is

off the shelf. A lot of it's even do-it-yourself.

One of those things you just saw flashed

before you was a raven drone, the handheld

tossed one. For about a thousand dollars,

you can build one yourself, equivalent to

what the soldiers use in Iraq.

That raises another wrinkle when it comes

to war and conflict. Good guys might play

around and work on these as hobby kits,

but so might bad guys.

This cross between robotics and things like

terrorism is going to be fascinating

and even disturbing,

and we've already seen it start.

During the war between Israel, a state,

and Hezbollah, a non-state actor,

the non-state actor flew

four different drones against Israel.

There's already a jihadi website

that you can go on and remotely

detonate an IED in Iraq while sitting

at your home computer.

And so I think what we're going to see is

two trends take place with this.

First is, you're going to reinforce the power

of individuals against governments,

but then the second is that

we are going to see an expansion

in the realm of terrorism.

The future of it may be a cross between

al Qaeda 2.0 and the

next generation of the Unabomber.

And another way of thinking about this

is the fact that, remember, you don't have

to convince a robot that they're gonna

receive 72 virgins after they die

to convince them to blow themselves up.

But the ripple effects of this are going to go

out into our politics. One of the people that

I met with was a former Assistant Secretary of

Defense for Ronald Reagan, and he put it

this way: "I like these systems because

they save American lives, but I worry about

more marketization of wars,

more shock-and-awe talk,

to defray discussion of the costs.

People are more likely to support the use

of force if they view it as costless."

Robots for me take certain trends

that are already in play in our body politic,

and maybe take them to

their logical ending point.

We don't have a draft. We don't

have declarations of war anymore.

We don't buy war bonds anymore.

And now we have the fact that we're

converting more and more of our American

soldiers that we would send into harm's

way into machines, and so we may take

those already lowering bars to war

and drop them to the ground.

But the future of war is also going to be

a YouTube war.

That is, our new technologies don't merely

remove humans from risk.

They also record everything that they see.

So they don't just delink the public:

they reshape its relationship with war.

There's already several thousand

video clips of combat footage from Iraq

on YouTube right now,

most of it gathered by drones.

Now, this could be a good thing.

It could be building connections between

the home front and the war front

as never before.

But remember, this is taking place

in our strange, weird world, and so

inevitably the ability to download these

video clips to, you know, your iPod

or your Zune gives you

the ability to turn it into entertainment.

Soldiers have a name for these clips.

They call it war porn.

The typical one that I was sent was

an email that had an attachment of

video of a Predator strike taking out

an enemy site. Missile hits,

bodies burst into the air with the explosion.

It was set to music.

It was set to the pop song

"I Just Want To Fly" by Sugar Ray.

This ability to watch more

but experience less creates a wrinkle

in the public's relationship with war.

I think about this with a sports parallel.

It's like the difference between

watching an NBA game, a professional

basketball game on TV, where the athletes

are tiny figures on the screen, and

being at that basketball game in person

and realizing what someone seven feet

really does look like.

But we have to remember,

these are just the clips.

These are just the ESPN SportsCenter

version of the game. They lose the context.

They lose the strategy.

They lose the humanity. War just

becomes slam dunks and smart bombs.

Now the irony of all this is that

while the future of war may involve

more and more machines,

it's our human psychology that's driving

all of this, it's our human failings

that are leading to these wars.

So one example of this that has

big resonance in the policy realm is

how this plays out on our very real

war of ideas that we're fighting

against radical groups.

What is the message that we think we are

sending with these machines versus what

is being received in terms of the message.

So one of the people that I met was

a senior Bush Administration official,

who had this to say about

our unmanning of war:

"It plays to our strength. The thing that

scares people is our technology."

But when you go out and meet with people,

for example in Lebanon, it's a very

different story. One of the people

I met with there was a news editor, and

we're talking as a drone is flying above him,

and this is what he had to say.

"This is just another sign of the coldhearted

cruel Israelis and Americans,

who are cowards because

they send out machines to fight us.

They don't want to fight us like real men,

but they're afraid to fight,

so we just have to kill a few of their soldiers

to defeat them."

The future of war also is featuring

a new type of warrior,

and it's actually redefining the experience

of going to war.

You can call this a cubicle warrior.

This is what one Predator drone pilot

described of his experience fighting

in the Iraq War while never leaving Nevada.

"You're going to war for 12 hours,

shooting weapons at targets,

directing kills on enemy combatants,

and then you get in the car

and you drive home and within 20 minutes,

you're sitting at the dinner table

talking to your kids about their homework."

Now, the psychological balancing

of those experiences is incredibly tough,

and in fact those drone pilots have

higher rates of PTSD than many

of the units physically in Iraq.

But some have worries that this

disconnection will lead to something else,

that it might make the contemplation of war

crimes a lot easier when you have

this distance. "It's like a video game,"

is what one young pilot described to me

of taking out enemy troops from afar.

As anyone who's played Grand Theft Auto

knows, we do things in the video world

that we wouldn't do face to face.

So much of what you're hearing from me

is that there's another side

to technologic revolutions,

and that it's shaping our present

and maybe will shape our future of war.

Moore's Law is operative,

but so's Murphy's Law.

The fog of war isn't being lifted.

The enemy has a vote.

We're gaining incredible new capabilities,

but we're also seeing and experiencing

new human dilemmas. Now,

sometimes these are just "oops" moments,

which is what the head of a robotics

company described it, you just have

"oops" moments. Well, what are

"oops" moments with robots in war?

Well, sometimes they're funny. Sometimes,

they're like that scene from the

Eddie Murphy movie "Best Defense,"

playing out in reality, where they tested out

a machine gun-armed robot, and during

the demonstration it started spinning

in a circle and pointed its machine gun

at the reviewing stand of VIPs.

Fortunately the weapon wasn't loaded

and no one was hurt, but other times

"oops" moments are tragic,

such as last year in South Africa, where

an anti-aircraft cannon had a

"software glitch," and actually did turn on

and fired, and nine soldiers were killed.

We have new wrinkles in the laws of war

and accountability. What do we do

with things like unmanned slaughter?

What is unmanned slaughter?

We've already had three instances of

Predator drone strikes where we thought

we got bin Laden, and it turned out

not to be the case.

And this is where we're at right now.

This is not even talking about armed,

autonomous systems

with full authority to use force.

And do not believe that that isn't coming.

During my research I came across

four different Pentagon projects

on different aspects of that.

And so you have this question:

what does this lead to issues like

war crimes? Robots are emotionless, so

they don't get upset if their buddy is killed.

They don't commit crimes of rage

and revenge.

But robots are emotionless.

They see an 80-year-old grandmother

in a wheelchair the same way they see

a T-80 tank: they're both

just a series of zeroes and ones.

And so we have this question to figure out:

How do we catch up our 20th century

laws of war, that are so old right now

that they could qualify for Medicare,

to these 21st century technologies?

And so, in conclusion, I've talked about

what seems the future of war,

but notice that I've only used

real world examples and you've only seen

real world pictures and videos.

And so this sets a great challenge for

all of us that we have to worry about well

before you have to worry about your

Roomba sucking the life away from you.

Are we going to let the fact that what's

unveiling itself right now in war

sounds like science fiction and therefore

keeps us in denial?

Are we going to face the reality

of 21st century war?

Is our generation going to make the same

mistake that a past generation did

with atomic weaponry, and not deal with

the issues that surround it until

Pandora's box is already opened up?

Now, I could be wrong on this, and

one Pentagon robot scientist told me

that I was. He said, "There's no real

social, ethical, moral issues when it comes

to robots.

That is," he added, "unless the machine

kills the wrong people repeatedly.

Then it's just a product recall issue."

And so the ending point for this is

that actually, we can turn to Hollywood.

A few years ago, Hollywood gathered

all the top characters and created

a list of the top 100 heroes and

top 100 villains of all of Hollywood history,

the characters that represented the best

and worst of humanity.

Only one character made it onto both lists:

The Terminator, a robot killing machine.

And so that points to the fact that

our machines can be used

for both good and evil, but for me

it points to the fact that there's a duality

of humans as well.

This week is a celebration

of our creativity. Our creativity

has taken our species to the stars.

Our creativity has created works of arts

and literature to express our love.

And now, we're using our creativity

in a certain direction, to build fantastic

machines with incredible capabilities,

maybe even one day

an entirely new species.

But one of the main reasons that we're

doing that is because of our drive

to destroy each other, and so the question

we all should ask:

is it our machines, or is it us

that's wired for war?

Thank you. (Applause)