I actually planned to finish graduate school a while ago, as
in Summer 2011. Funny story: a home
break-in, a police report, a new laptop, and a complete redesign of my thesis’s
quant.-focused triangulation methodology into a rhetorical criticism later, I’m
just now getting ready to defend… as in Fall 2011. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all 2011. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get sweet swag
for sending out announcements (which all received thank you notes), even if the
announcements were premature. One good
gift was a Barnes & Noble gift card.
So when a store in Wichita decided to go out of business I went on a
media raid. One book I got out of the
deal was P.W. Singer’s, Wired for War. The book is on defense and intelligence
applications of digital technology, mostly remote and autonomous systems, but
also a few others. But when I read this
book, all I see is a wealth of networked social media regulating interpersonal
communications, blurring the line between what is media and what is un-mediated.
A. Hugh Jackman foolishly teaching a robot for combat in
the most recent pop-culture depiction of robots, Real Steel. Interesting
reasoning as to why you can’t just program a robot to box.
First
off, let me mention, Singer and I have a great deal in common. Both of us were products of a military family
that cherished service and duty, but chose to walk different paths than the
generations of men and women whom proceeded us.
Both of us are sci-fi nerds (to use the latter term positively) that
straddle the fence between awe and fear of robots. Both of us take the ethical implications of
what we write about as a responsibility.
I emailed him about it early on.
He actually responded and was pretty cool about giving tips on how to
get published. The guy really is
brilliant for packaging his book as part of a larger, digital package found free online. Not that I really need it, but this would
make doing a standard high school ‘book report,’ just covering the contents of
Singer’s work, beyond easy. But to cover
that portion real quick, I identified six key themes that wove the larger story
Singer was trying to tell.
1. Technology
is key to contemporary military hegemony (not exactly a brain-buster
for any history student).
2.
Electronic and digital technologies are greatly
changing the battlefield,
while the battlefield has historically been a catalyst for technological change
in the civilian
sector.
3.
Human factors are now the
technological limits, thus the urge to use unmanned or automated systems.
4.
Remotely controlled and artificially intelligent
technologies are operational at present, not things of the future. (If you
aren’t sufficiently creeped
out by robots, Singer’s online videos will accomplish this).
5.
Art predicting future reality becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy; real-life
invention imitates art as art imitates life, both real and imagined. (Marshall McLuhan could have spent a decade
in studious hermitage if he had ever read this book.)
6.
These new tech. require a rethinking of ethics, international law, and the identity of
soldiers—but this process is nothing new.
Singer does a great
job of pointing out the historical roots of the term robot. I’ve always been an
etymology nerd, too, so add that similarity to the pile. Singer alerted me to the playwright Karel Čapek’s
adaptation of the Czech prefix for
forced labor:
Robota,
drudgery, peasant work;
Robotnik,
peasant, serf
And they all spur from: Rabota,
slave
Not exactly promising that the person
whom imagined the archetype for autonomous machines had this on his mind. There was actually a humanist social critique
in all of it. Which was lost (probably
in translation) when the show (R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots) became a hit
on Broadway in the mid-Twenties. Karel
Čapek died of pneumonia in 1938 when Nazi-Germany invaded Czechoslovakia; had
he survived the winter, he likely would have been sent to Bergen-Belsen like
his brother. Never a communist and a
fervent pacifist, Karel Čapek was listed as the Nazi Gestapo’s second
most-wanted Czechoslovakian, simply because of his plays and political
writings. (On a side note, open pitch to
James Cameron: T4: Nazi Robots,
subtitled, “The SkyNet conspiracy goes deeper than you knew.” Robots go back in time to hunt down Čapek,
weave into historical narrative. Think Inglorious Bastards meets Terminator. Let’s go nuts. Call me.)
So
from this basic idea of Čapek’s imagination, we get the creations of James
Cameron (Terminator), Isaac Asimov (iRobots and the three laws of robotics),
Arthur C. Clarke (HAL 9000), and Wolverine Hugh Jackman teaching a robot
to box in the latest Hollywood film, Real
Steel. This is also where engineers
can trace back their conceptual work on robots to. But here’s where it gets weird: It’s not just
robots. For instance, Singer points out
that two American archetypes were born in the same Van Nuys Factory:
In 1944, army photographer David Conover was
sent to this factory for a magazine shoot about women contributing to the war effort. He spotted a buxom woman spraying the drones
with fire retardant. It was not the most
sexy of settings but he thought this woman had potential as a model and sent
his photos on to a friend at a model agency.
Norma Jeane Dougherty soon dyed her mousy brown hair to platinum blond
and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.
After [World War II], the Northrop company bought out Denny [the
original U.S. unmanned drone manufacturer], meaning that the icon of the blonde
bombshell and the Global Hawk drone both were born in the same place. (2009, p.
50)
And let’s not forget about how all
the robots, drones, and soldiers whom depend on them talk to each other and
receive their orders from commanders: the Internet. A guy named Marshall McLuhan actually
published the following prediction, shortly before the first Internet connection
was used to send a message between computer networks at UCLA and Stanford in
1969:
“The next medium,
whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include
television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform
television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication
instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization,
retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to
speedily tailored data of a saleable kind” (McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy:
The Making of Typographic Man, 1962)
The
computer scientists whom made that connection possible conceptualized their
venture in 1962 as “The Intergalactic Computer Network.” Just want to point out: you can’t find a more
obvious understanding of Gutenberg Galaxy
than the previous allusion displays.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) provided massive
funding in 1963, in addition to the exorbitant sums spent by the National
Science Foundation. Just another note:
this would inherently signify that the Internet is not the product of a free
market, but rather the product of big government investment. The first message sent was “LO”, which was
initially meant to be “login,” but I think anyone reading this now understands
as the Internet laughing (“lol” for short) at the first people trying to make
it work. (“LO—CRASH”). Singer also talks about the first “bugs” in
computers and the long technological road that has lead to what is possible in
unmanned systems today.
The picture
painted for the reader is one where hundreds of remote systems may drop data
(in the form of actionable information) into the lap of commanders and their
subordinates in the rear echelon. This
can result in serious data overload and already has resulted in the Army
Officers in charge of drone requisition logistics to come up with some
interesting protocol that sounds more like a chat room: no flaming (all caps)
and no emoticons. Or even funnier, a
story Singer tells of soldiers using Google chat to coordinate missions ends
with a full-bird Colonel representing himself with the avatar of a random and
buxom female cartoon figure. But the
real problem is the aforementioned data overload.
“As systems get more
and more capable, there is a bit of a paradox going on with user
interface. In the words of a sergeant
just back from Iraq, sometimes there is just ‘too much technology… it can be
overwhelming.’ The major problem is the
ever-growing amount of data that a robot can send a user.” (p. 68)
The problem
is that the computer systems and AI programs cannot distinguish an apple from a
tomato and react. This is no metaphor: a
major challenge for computers is sensing subtle or contextual differences in
their environment and reacting accordingly.
A tomato and an apple are both spherical, both red, but their physical
and internal structure is very different.
So how does an engineer get a farmhand robot to do both tasks? So humans have to stay “in the loop” with
their robotic creations, providing mediated levels of automation and
intelligence. This puts a huge workload
on the individuals who operate unmanned systems for military
organizations. Other than smarter AI,
the only way a human can handle this amount of information would be cybernetic
enhancement. This doesn’t scare me so
much, my brother is technically a cyborg—his total deafness has been alleviated
with a cybernetic implant to his cochlea, or inner ear. The “Neuromancer Brain Jack,” popularized
first in cyberpunk graphic novels, but later by the Matrix trilogy, is already a reality. But just as all scifi nerds and psychologists
know, the brain is just a computer that can still be overloaded and made to
explode with too much data. So even
cybernetic enhancement is not a real solution.
The only answer is acculturating robots and socializing them with
humans, so that they may understand our social constructions embedded in
language and culture. We must teach our
robots, just like Hugh Jackman in Real
Steel. Robots can be programmed to
hit each other, but an entertaining fight requires more than just a program, it
requires creativity and a teacher. This
is the same reason why the world’s smartest computer, WATSON, created by
Microsoft, could annihilate its competitors in Jeopardy, yet still answer the following question with the
following answer, in the category “US Cities”:
Trebek: “Its largest
airport is named for a World War II hero, its second largest for a World War II
battle.”
WATSON: “What is
Toronto?????”
B. Oh, WATSON. We humans are silly, but we still call you 'dumb.'
This was more likely than Chicago by
a 3% confidence interval. The reason is
because WATSON learns, and WATSON learned that categories are not real. One blogger explained, “It has learned
through exhaustive statistical analysis that many clues do not jibe with
categories.” For example, “US Novelists”
may contain a question about J.D. Salinger (a novelist) but the answer does not fit the category “What is Catcher in the Rye (a novel).
So the natural noisiness of humans works against computers, even if it
is that extra noise that makes us human beings, not robots.
So do we actually need to sit down
with robots and give tutoring lessons?
Or should we just plug a cable into our brain stems and let them
download us? The answer, is actually
in-between. The intended and unintended
communications of social media and Web2.0 will be the most pragmatic mode of
automaton pedagogy. In the older HTML
based language, form, content, and function are separate and must be specified
for all data displayed. In XML, form,
content and function are combined because of how we link, encode, tag, and retrofit data into the Web. In short,
SEO/SMO may be the only thing stopping any future self-aware, SkyNet-esque
robot enemy to destroy us, simply because of the irrationality of our
memes! But on a more positive note, our
usage is structuring a mediated reality that mirrors our unmediated reality.
After reading Wired for War, I was left asking: What isn’t social media and what
isn’t a military application? Hezbollah
creates a videogame or cartoons for kids to collaborate with the digital
intifada. The Tamil Tigers hack and hijack
empty satellite bandwidth to create a broadcast channel for the Tamil minority
in Sri Lanka that beams across the world.
Robots are embedded with so much emotion, young soldiers give them pet
names and cry at their destruction in battle, as if they were human. Petraeus chooses to keep tweeting even if it’s
a security risk. WikiLeaks creating the
ultimate real politik of information. Or
UAVs as social media: the data is created by everyone underneath, and the data
they get from the network is quite deadly.
This has created an interesting unity among those terrorized by unmanned
systems, as one Lebanese moderate explained:
“The use of [drones]
was ‘spurring mass identity politics… The new combination of Islamist, Arab
nationalist and resistance mentality is seen as an antidote to the technology
discrepancy […] it is enhancing the spirit of defiance’ […] both the Hezbollah
fighters in the field and the broader Lebanese populace saw that ‘the enemy is
using machines to fight from afar. Your
defiance in the face of it shows your heroism, your humanity’ […] As an Arab
moderate, Khouri was not happy about such reactions. But then again, he was also not happy about
having spent the last few weeks watching UAVs fly over as his city was bombed.” (Rami Khouri, Director, Issam Fares Institute
of Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut; As
cited in Singer, 2011, pp. 308-309)
If the use of drones doesn’t scare
you, simply because you are American and believe that it could never happen to
you, know that Hezbollah has successfully deployed drones against Israel and
terror suspect was arrested in New York that had actually acquired drones and
planned to use them as explosives.
Autonomous sea scouts, UAVs, packbots, throwbots, birdbots, bugbots,
fishbots; it is all startlingly real. If
it’s on that list, it’s either in production or the final stages of
developments. Robots are already in
space (satellites use non-linear mathematics and AI to stay in place).
So I’d like to end with a final thought
I had while reading the final chapters of Wired
for War, which introduces the next level of thought: What is our ethical
role as communicators and citizens (netizens) in this new world? If we are to coexist in a world wired for
war, as Singer describes, then we must look at the way we interact, not only in
unmediated settings, but in the virtual reality of social networking, because
the creations of futurists and robotic engineers may not always behave in the
manner intended. They may learn more
than they were intended, they may in fact go haywire. But their basic means for learning how to
interact with humans, is mimicry of the interpersonal interactions they can
understand. Our social networks do not
always present the most social part of our humanity. Humanity’s fate may well depend on this, and
that is no science fiction. Ultimately,
we are the authors of the science non-fiction, or our techno-cultural
future. Will we end up friends, like in Real Steel? Or perpetually hunted like Sarah and John
Connor? We decide, based on the example
we are currently setting for our mechanical friends.
