P.W. Singer on “Soldiers of Fortran,” i.e. robots that kill people
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That there is an X-Box.
That there is six of the reported 17,000+ military robots that the U.S. operates, including a scary-ass robot-speedboat-gunship thingy and the scarier-ass SWORDS robot, which operates an M-16 rifle and a friggin’ rocket launcher. What’s the correlation between the two? Well, you’ll see in the following excerpt from Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewing P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century:
AMY GOODMAN: You write that the best [U.S. Army drone] pilot is an eighteen-year-old kid who trained on an [Xbox] video game?
P.W. SINGER: Yeah. He was actually a high school dropout who wanted to join the military to make his father proud. He wanted to be a helicopter mechanic. And they said, “Well, you failed your high school English course, so you’re not qualified to be a mechanic. But would you like to be a drone pilot?” And he said, “Sure.” And it turned out, because of playing on video games, he was already good at it. He was naturally trained up. And he turned out to be so good that they brought him back from Iraq and made him an instructor in the training academy, even though he’s an enlisted man and he’s still–he was nineteen.
If you think that’s fascinating, let me tell you, you haven’t even scratched the surface–watch a video of the interview here. (And don’t be scared off by what appears to be a run-time of 51:36; that’s the length of the entire program, but the link will handily queue up only the interview in question, which starts at 28:18 and is significantly shorter.)
thanks neil!
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