Humans and Machines

John Edward Jackson

Whatever they are called-drones, robots, or unmanned systems-these “digital assistants” will have a profound impact on the way people live and the way combat is conducted in the future. Experts such as P.W. Singer and others believe that today’s drones are at the developmental stage analogous to where the Model-T Ford was in the early days of the automobile and where personal computers were in the early 1980s.As impressive as current capabilities may be, they pale in comparison with where they will be in ten, fifteen or twenty years.

The exponential increase in the capabilities of intelligent machines has at its base some simple laws of physics and the growth of micro-miniature manufacturing. What is commonly referred to as Moore’s law is not a law in the legal or scientific sense. Instead, it is a prediction made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel Corporation, that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years. This prediction held true for four decades and then accelerated until we now see such growth about every eighteen months. These incredibly small and complex microchips enable unimaginable levels of computing power. For example, in 2016 Intel’s Xeon Broadwell chip contained 7.2 billion transistors on a single chip. Better microchips (and other factors) lead to faster, more powerful, and cheaper computers for virtually every application. The cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, has predicted that by 2030 we will have computers a million times more powerful than today’s personal computers. One must wonder about the astounding computerized world that could exist in a few short decades.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

Countless stories have been written, and movies produced, about intelligent and malevolent robots who turn on their human masters. Whether the threat comes from all-powerful Skynet in the Terminator movies of from the Cylons in television’s Battlestar Galactica, the drama is derived from humanity’s struggle to defeat mechanical super machines. Flesh-and-blood Homo sapien is portrayed as slower, weaker, and less intelligent than its artificial opponents. The tipping point in the narrative usually occurs when the robots reach a level of self-awareness (or sentience) that makes them question the master-servant or master-slave relationship. The previous chapters have looked in some detail at the meaning of “One Nation under Drones.” It is fair to ask who will be in charge: man or machine. While the question may seem ridiculous on the surface, many critics with impressive credentials believe action must be taken now to forestall a future that does not bode well for humanity.

A sentient or conscious machine would have a capacity to feel, perceive, and exercise a need for self-preservation. It would have a level of intelligence equal to or greater than a human being and would also be able to display desire, ambition, will, ethics, personality, and other human qualities. Turning again to science fiction, the character Data, an android or artificial human, appears in the television series Star Trek: The