Robot soldiers more fact than fiction

The world is on the brink of a “robotics revolution” in military combat that will have profound social, psychological, political and ethical effects, says a leading US defence analyst.

Peter Singer, who headed Barack Obama’s defence policy team during last year’s presidential campaign, said yesterday that the use of robots for fighting war was growing exponentially.

The US had invaded Iraq in 2003 with just over a handful of unmanned aerial drones, and no unmanned ground vehicles, he said. Today it used more than 7000 drones in the air, and more than 12,000 unmanned ground vehicles capable of combat.

More than 43 countries were developing military robotics, including Israel, Iran, China, Pakistan and Russia, as well as Britain and Australia.

In 25 years, Dr Singer said,

“our robotics will be about a billion times more powerful [in their computing power] than today”.

Their use in warfare was a massive development in human history, he told the Lowy Institute in Sydney, via videolink from Washington.

“We are living through the end of humankind’s 5000-year-old monopoly on the fighting of war … The robots of today are the first technologies to change the ‘who’ of war, not just the ‘how’ of war…”

Dr Singer, who has just written Wired For War, warned that remote war-fighting could come at a high price, as nation-states would be unable to keep the technology to themselves.

Adversaries such as al-Qaeda were also likely to gain the use of remote war-fighting devices. And there were a host of social, ethical and doctrinal questions developing from the use of such weapons.

With robotics transforming the nature of warfare, it was risky, he warned, to

“make grand commitments before you figure out where things are headed”.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, defence policy, Peter Singer, Robot soliers, robots

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