Isaac Asimov, Where are You When We Need You?

There have been periods in my life when I have been addicted to science fiction, and in particular to the roughly five million books produced by Isaac Asimov (I think he wrote in his sleep too.). Thanks to the recent movie I Robot based on Asimov’s work, even many non-Asimov fans are familiar now with his famous three laws of robotics.

Fearful that a race of robots could one day dominate humans, both intellectually and physically, all robots were hot wired with three unbreakable rules in this sequence:

1) Do not harm humans.
2) Obey humans.
3) Once you have those two covered, then preserve yourself.

I wrote in my book The Democracy Owners’ Manual how I wished we could make corporations follow this same sequence of commands instead of the reverse which they seem to follow. But that is a topic for another day.

An article in today’s New York Times suggests that we ought to get moving on those Robot Rules sooner than expected. As part of a $127 billion project (that breaks down to about $430 per man, woman and child in the US) the Pentagon is developing robot soldiers. Within a few decades we’ll have machines programmed and capable of killing in our name.

Let’s think about that a minute. On the one side I have a 17-year-old son. Would I rather that Presidents send machines into battle than him? You betcha. This of course is the selling point, as one general is quoted, “They don’t get hungry, they are not afraid, they don’t care of they guy next to them has just been shot.” They are also a big money saver apparently, at an average lifetime cost of $4 million per live soldier (which breaks down to about 1,200 full UC Berkeley scholarships for a year).

Then there is the other side. In addition to all the risks of technology gone wrong – poorly programmed warriors opening up fire on civilians, etc. – what can history tell us about the technology of the future? If there is one historical constant about war that has been handed down through the ages it is this – we can always count on political leaders to send soldiers off to war for reasons that in retrospect were little more than error or ego. From chasing after Helen of Troy to chasing down imaginary weapons of mass destructions, the record isn’t pretty.

If war becomes cheap, both in terms of life and money, will the US slide into it even more gracefully than it does now? Will we ever actually NOT be at war again?

Then there is one more science fiction memory from my youth, a film called the Colossus – the Corbin Project. Colossus was a computer set up to control US nuclear arms after it all got so complex that humans couldn’t operate the system anymore. As you might imagine, in the movie the computer just took over and ran the world too.

Robots as soldiers? It makes me nervous, it makes me real nervous. After all, we won’t even know until next summer if Jedi Knights can beat back a clone army. Put the robot army together with the US real life Star Wars plans and can the Death Star be far behind?