Robert Brockway - Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

• Never kill an unarmed robot, unless it was built without arms

• Protect the weak at all costs (they are easy meals).

• Never turn your back on a fight (unless you have rocket launchers mounted there).

But hey, you know that old saying: “Why do we make mistakes? So we can learn from them.”

Some mistakes are just more rocket propelled than others.

THE ROBOTS WOULD have to be more effective fighters and hunters than we already are in order to do away with us, and that doesn’t just mean weapons. Anything can be equipped with nearly any weapon, and a robot with a chain saw is no more inherently deadly than a squirrel with a chain saw—it’s all in the ability to use it. It’s like they say:

Give a squirrel a chain saw, you run for a day. Teach a squirrel to chain saw, and you run forever. And we’re handing those metaphorical chain saws to those metaphorical squirrels like it’s National Trade Your Nuts for Blades Day.

Take, for example, the issue of maneuverability. As experts in avionics or fans of Robocop can tell you, agility and maneuverability are difficult concepts when you’re talking about solid steel instruments of destruction. The ED-209, that chicken-footed, robo-bastard villain from Robocop , was taken out by a simple stairwell, and planes are downed by disgruntled geese all the time. The latter is a phenomenon so common that there’s even a name for it: bird strike. And, apart from making a rather excellent title for an action movie (possibly a buddy-cop film starring Larry Byrd and his wacky new partner—a furious bear named Strike!), the bird-strike scenario is very emblematic of a major hurdle in modern mechanics: Inertia makes agility tough when you’re hurtling tons of steel at high speeds. But recently that problem has been solved by a machine called the MKV. If you’re taking notes, all previous scientists developing harmless-sounding names for your dangerous technology, the MKV is proof positive that comfort is not a requirement when titling new tech. “MKV” stands for, I swear to God, Multiple Kill Vehicle. Presumably the first in the soon to be classic Kill Vehicle line of products, the MKV recently passed a highly technical and extremely rigorous aerial agility test at the National Hover Test Facility (which is an entire facility dedicated to throwing things in the air and then determining whether they stay there). The MKV proved that it could maneuver with pinpoint accuracy at high speeds in three-dimensional space—moving vertically, horizontally, and diagonally at breakneck speeds—and it’s capable of doing this because it’s basically just a giant bundle of rockets pointing every which way that fire with immense force whenever a turn is required. Its intended purpose is to track and shoot down intercontinental ballistic projectiles using a single interceptor missile. To this end, it uses data from the Ballistic Missile Defense System to track incoming targets, in addition to its own seeker system. When a target is verified, the Multiple Kill Vehicle releases—I shit you not—a “cargo of Small Kill Vehicles” whose purpose is to “destroy all countermeasures.” So, this target-tracking, hypermaneuverable bundle of missiles first releases a gaggle of other, smaller tracking missiles, just to shoot down your defenses , before it will even fire its actual missiles at you. In summation, the MKV is a bunch of small missiles, strapped to a group of larger missiles, which in turn are attached to one giant master missile… with what basically amounts to an all-seeing eye mounted on it.

Well, it’s official: The government is taking its ideas directly from the Trapper Keeper sketches of twelve-year-old boys. Expect to be marveling at the next anticipated leap in military avionics: a Camaro jumping a skyscraper while on fire and surrounded by floating malformed boobs.

Q:Is object resting gently on the ground?

[ ] Yes. (Fail.)

[ ] No. (Pass!)

Oh, but in all this hot, missile-on-missile action, there’s something fundamental you may have missed about the MKV: That whole “target-tracking” thing. The procedure at the National Hover Test Facility demonstrated the MKV’s ability to “recognize and track a surrogate target in a flight environment.” It’s not just agility that’s being tested here, but also target tracking and independent recognition. And that’s a big deal: A key drawback in robotics so far has been recognition—it’s challenging to create a robot that can even self-navigate through a simple hallway, much less one that recognizes potential targets autonomously and tracks them (and by “them” I mean you) well enough to take them down (and by “take them down” I mean painfully explode).

These advancements in independent recognition are not just limited to high-tech military hardware, either, as you probably could have guessed. And as you can also probably guess, there is a cutesy candy shell covering the rich milk chocolate of horror below. Students at MIT have a robot named Nexi that is specifically designed to track, recognize, and respond to human faces. Infrared LEDs map the depth of field in front of the robot, and that depth information is then paired with the images from two stereo cameras. All three are combined to give the robot a full 3-D understanding of the human face, and in another sterling example of Unnecessary Additions, the students also gave Nexi the ability to be upset. If you walk too close, if you block its cameras, if you put your hand too near its face—Jesus, it gets pissed off at anything. God forbid you touch it; it’ll probably kill your dog.

Facial-recognition technology is an exciting field and should not, in and of itself, frighten anybody. If there’s something inherently worrying about robots being capable of individual facial recognition and memory, which, among other things, is the first vital step toward learning how to hold a grudge, I certainly can’t find it.

So far this drastic increase in visual recognition is largely for harmless projects like Nexi, and not yet installed in murderous machine-gun-toting super sniper bots. Well, not in America anyway. But Korea? Not so lucky. It seems that Samsung, benevolent manufacturer of cell phones and air conditioners, also manufactures something else: the world’s first completely autonomous deployed killing machines. Up to this point no robot had been granted a license to kill; all authorization to engage was still in human hands. You’ll recall that this lack of autonomy was literally the only thing saving dozens of American soldiers when a glitch in a war bot’s software started acting up, so, though robots have drastically improved abilities in accuracy and firing rates, at least on some level it was still just some dude ultimately responsible for your life. People are unpredictable: They may succumb to mercy, they may be inattentive, or they may just make an off-the-book judgment call that saves your life. But the Intelligent Surveillance & Security Guard Robot? It does no such thing. It recognizes potential targets independently, assesses their threat level, and decides whether to fire its machine guns all on its own, with no human interaction.