Wall Street Journal Asks: “Could We Trust Killer Robots?” (We Ask: Would They Be Silver Bugs?)

In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal May 19-20, 2012, which I swear I stopped subscribing to but remains to be delivered, a piece entitled, “Could We Trust Killer Robots?” appeared. It details a near-future world in which the United States military has been made wholly robotic. The subtitle reads, “A drone may never have a sense of morality, but it might perform better than a human soldier in sparing the innocent.”

In this apparently not-so-far-off world, Wall Street Journal uses 2015 (two-and-half-years) as an example, the robot will be able to determine through “infrared cameras, heat sensors, and other tools of surveillance determined whether the target is indeed a militant.” The robot will decipher when a person is “ready to attack” on a scale from -1 (a noncombatant) to +1 (a confirmed combatant.) Clearly, this is very complicated stuff.

After the delineation, the robot will then assess whether or not children or other civilians are in the nearby, “and that everything else is in order.” Once it chooses the proper weapon it will then proceed to “kill! Kill! Kill!” The robot then assesses the damage and either “kill! Kill! Kill’s!”again or, if the enemy is dead, proceeds on patrol.

What SV wonders is, aside from the silver that will be used to make functional these robots, Will this new robotic species themselves be predisposed silver investors?

The robots are being developed since 2006 by Ronald Arkin, his colleagues and the U.S. Army Research Office. They are anticipated to be capable “not only of carrying out pinpoint attacks but of deciding on their own when it is permissible to fire on a particular target.  In his own words, Dr. Arkin wants to frankenstein “lethal autonomous systems.” He aims to ensure they strictly follow the “laws of war.” (-1 for unlawful and +1 for lawful)

The piece then turns philosophical, pondering the question, “Could a machine ever be capable of making the practical and ethical decisions demanded of American troops in the field.”

Dr. Arkin believes this to be so.  The robots “will not have the full moral reasoning capabilities of humans,” he explains, “but I believe they can – and this is a hypothesis – perform better than humans.”

The “killing machine,” as Wall Street Journal subtly calls the robots, so far in the officially-disclosed development, looks like an MQ-9 Reaper, the remotely controlled drone aircraft that kills across the globe.  Dr. Arkin’s RE-search is set to give rise to such a craft that would have “complete autonomy to hunt down enemies and kill them, restricted by the laws of war as laid out in the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties. But, what’s likely is that DARPA and other military-industrial complex thugs intend machines like this to do the moralizing and replace a human military with rock bottom morale:

The machine would permit itself to kill. According to Wall Street Journal, the ethical killing machine “would attempt to minimize suffering by using the least powerful weapon need to knock out the target.”

Imaginably, as the role of automated weaponry bleeds into each-and-every orifice of our violent civilization – into each and every bureaucracy and policing job afforded by the powers-that-be – the robots will become an increasing part of a diminishing human life.

As the population declines, more-and-more menial service jobs on up to warfare might be occupied by robots. If these robots are able to make deeply complicated decisions of morality and ethics, then might they too be capable of making robotal financial decisions?

Well, axiomatically, their worldview of morality and ethics is totally warped. Their indoctrination was programmed from the absolute get-go by a man masquerading as God and is a part of every wire, metal and nail of which it is contrived. The robot’s morality and ethics can only be conceived of by the robot in the frame of view that war itself is moral and ethical.

Similarly, if we find ourselves amongst a robot population, I predict they will be utter paperbugs, totally dedicated to paper assets in the stock market and taking huge risks and gambles as dominant culture brokers do. Las Vegas would be inundated with robot culture and vice versa. This then would mean that, other than the considerable amounts of silver they would require to function, they would have little impact on Silver in the New World Order.