Resistance leader John Connor’s battle against the machines in post-apocalyptic 2018 in the fourth movie of the Terminator franchise has resonance now as we let robots loose on the battlefield. Hardly small beer, $2.75 billion is the US budget alone for unmanned military systems in 2009.
Accordingly, battle-bots, drones and unmanned ground and air assault craft now come in all shapes and sizes for every type of warfare. One undoubted success story, the MQ-9 Reaper drone controlled from many miles away can precisely target insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq with laser-guided missiles or GPS-guided smart bombs. And humanoid battlefield extraction bots have been designed to rescue injured troops.There again, consider the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1 sentry armed with a Daewoo K3 light machine gun: currently it requires human permission to fire, although Samsung says that it can also be set up to identify and take out intruders automatically. As Skynet controls the terminators, so humans try to control present-day robots on a one-to-one basis. However, our next enemies, ever more sophisticated, might target, intercept and addle the communications between robots and their operators. Does that mean that we should give robots the ability to think and operate on their own ? Viewers of the Terminator films are bound to question the wisdom of enabling robots to learn for themselves. The danger is that, if you allow a fighting machine to acquire knowledge, you cannot predict what lessons it may choose to learn and where that could lead.
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