Genesys: War Through The Wormhole

This summer, 25 robots from around the world will go head to head in a competition to test how machines could one day provide assistance after natural or man-made disasters.

Fourteen new teams from around the world, including participants from Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, China, South Korea and the United States, have joined 11 previously selected teams to compete in the June event, hosted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Pomona, California.

As part of the event, the bots will attempt tasks such as walking about 30 feet (10 meters), activating an emergency shut-off switch and getting up from a lying position. The winning three teams will take home a combined $3.5 million in cash prizes, DARPA officials said.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge, which began in 2012, is a competition to build human-controlled robots that may be used to perform challenging tasks that are dangerous for humans.

“We are trying to make robots and human beings work together,” Gill Pratt, program manager for the contest, said at March 5th, 2015 news conference. “Robots are very good at working in dangerous environments, while humans are very good at making judgment calls,” he said., The finals will require the robots to be un-tethered, which means the machines will need to be able to keep their balance or recover from a fall, adding a new level of difficulty. The robots must also have a battery or other onboard power source.

The genesys of the “warbot” on the modern battlefield has happened so fast the mainstream news has not been able to keep up with the science. Every so often we get a glimpse of newly created mechanized death systems that are now auto-programmed to go out on dangerous missions in place of the battlefield soldier.

When the U.S. military invaded Iraq just over a decade ago, it only had a handful of unmanned systems, aka drones, in the air, and zero deployed into the ground forces. Today, its inventory in the air numbers well over 7,000, ranging from the now famous Predator and Reaper to the Navy’s new MQ-8 Fire Scout, a helicopter drone that just completed a series of autonomous takeoffs and landing tests from the back of a guided-missile destroyer.

According to Brookings scholar Peter Singer and his report to the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania the U.S. forces that stormed into Iraq in 2003 had no robots on the ground.

There were none in Afghanistan either.

Now we know that both wars were fought with the help of an estimated 12,000 ground-based robots and 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the technical term for drone, or robotic aircraft.

The first armed robot was deployed in Iraq in 2007 and it is as lethal as its acronym is long: Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS). Its mounted M249 machine gun can hit a target more than 3,000 feet away with pin-point precision.

From the air, the best-known UAV, the Predator, killed dozens of insurgent leaders – as well as scores of civilians whose death has prompted protests both from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Predators are flown by operators sitting in front of television monitors in cubicles at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 8,000 miles from Afghanistan and Taliban sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The cubicle pilots in Nevada run no physical risks whatsoever — to them it is akin to shooting in a video arcade.

It just goes to show you how easy it was for Barack Obama to give the green light to a string of Predator strikes into Pakistan.

The frightening part is that real live war of the Terminators has a potential to become a reality as declared wars in many forms will allow for machines to do the killing jobs as they can carry out whatever programming they receive,

Central Intelligence Agency boss John Brennan took part in a question and answer session at Harvard last week. The most important thing to take away from the event is that the nation’s top intelligence official does not believe the war on terror will ever end.

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was surprisingly candid (for a man who lies for a living) when he answered questions regarding the likelihood of the disastrous War on Terror ever ending. He ham-handedly attempted to stick to the tired old clichés and talking points, but he was open and honest about one fact: America’s sons and daughters will continue to die under this ill-conceived foreign policy for “millennia” to come. To be sure, there were plenty of statements regarding how terrorists are evildoers that they hate us for our freedom, that we have to fight them over there or we’ll fight them here.

There is also talk of how a new super soldier and robotic solder will be in the battle ground as well. So far we have limited ourselves to drone warfare and a few human like robots that still need work on their power supply capabilities.

DARPA’s Land Warrior and its successor projects (Objective Force Warrior, Future Force Warrior, and now Warrior Web) aim to equip soldiers with wearable computers, advanced communications gear, helmet visors with night vision and head-up-display, and robotic exoskeletons for improved mobility. While the potential may be vast, such human enhancement has suffered the same setbacks and slow progress as the development of other robotic systems. The gear is still too heavy, and the exoskeletons that could enable soldiers to carry more and move faster lack a sufficient power source.

At the same time, there has been remarkable progress in neuroscience with respect to mapping and manipulating the human brain. Though not currently employed, a number of technologies have potential military applications. A technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) has been shown to enhance the concentration and alertness of human test subjects. EEGs embedded in helmets might one day enable soldiers to control weapons through the power of thought. A research project at Duke University showed that a monkey with an implanted brain chip could control a robotic arm, and researchers at Brown University created the first wireless brain-computer interface.

The ultimate goal of some in the Pentagon is to develop “super soldiers” who could be deployed anywhere in the world within hours and remain in the field for extended periods of time. Their bodies and performance could potentially be enhanced through nanosensors that constantly monitor their medical status, embedded nanoneedles that release drugs when needed, and possibly even nanorobots that can quickly heal wounds in the field.

The use of military robots raises both ethical and tactical concerns. Will they be able to distinguish targets and use force proportionately? Will soldiers be willing to fight alongside completely autonomous robots? Could robots one day entirely replace humans and human-operated systems on the battlefield?

What role might robots play in non-traditional wars such as the war on terror or the fight against transnational organized crime? These questions, along with other unknowns, have led United Nations Special Reporter Christof Heyns, Human Rights Watch, and other critics to call for a ban on autonomous military robots

While the watchdog groups are trying to muscle some support against rogue robots of war, it seems the war hawks and death peddlers have some interesting things to say about why the war will continue.

“Defense One,” a military-industrial complex trade magazine that partners with the Council on Foreign Relations, provided a wonderful quote:

If I look across the board in terms of since 9/11 at terrorist organizations, and if the United States in all of its various forms. In intelligence, military, homeland security, law enforcement, diplomacy. If we were not as engaged against the terrorists, I think we would be facing a horrendous, horrendous environment. Because they would have taken full advantage of the opportunities that they have had across the region.

If the US didn’t pick countries to invade by throwing darts at a map of the Middle East, arm enemies of the United States, destabilize governments, engage in torture, drone strike civilians, back tyrants, and generally create mayhem all over the Middle East, we could easily find a way to create some sort of peaceful solution to our problems.

However the die has been cast and the new electronic battlefield is the bought-and-paid-for nightmare that will be the next act in what will remain the eternal war.

If we did not have the type of diplomacy we see now and if we didn’t act like destructive clowns completely unaware of the destruction that follows us wherever we go perhaps we would have greater control over the situations that flare up.

But of course the antics of the battlefield and what can only be compared to SKYNET records of drones that attempted to assassinate 41 men demonstrate that in those attempts 1147 people were killed. Each one of those 1106 extra casualties had a family. Even if only one family member from each of those killed joins the insurgency or becomes radicalized, the DCI’s estimate of taking more off the battlefield than it has put on is completely inaccurate.

We should be deeply concerned that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) could develop in directions not anticipated by scientists. Because of this unpredictability, the US military has indicated that it will never remove humans from the decision loop completely.

While unmanned weapons systems will become gradually more autonomous so that they can carry out very specific missions with less human direction, they may never entirely replace human soldiers on the battlefield.

The technological augmentation and modification of human soldiers raises even more troubling ethical issues than the development of autonomous robots. Since millions of dollars could go into technologically upgrading the body and mind of a single soldier, would the soldier be allowed to quit military service?

What does it mean for an egalitarian and democratic society to provide certain individuals with superhuman abilities? While enhancing human soldiers may have its benefits, it opens up a web of ethical, political, and legal dilemmas.

We all think that these dilemmas belong to the comic books, however your Hulks, Iron Men and Captain Americas of the future will still fight side by side with robots and other machines used for mechanized death.

At least that is what the prevailing predictive programming shows us.

In the race for extinction, which our proud technological nations are carried out undeterred by that “minor” collateral damage, i.e. the death of all of us, there are many machines that have potential to inch us closer to a planned Armageddon.

To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them, to die?

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org