Stanislaw Lem - Peace on Earth

“Do you know, Ijon, what the team from General Pedipulatrics and its robots couldn’t manage? Walking on two legs! They flopped because their prototype kept flopping over! Good, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Gyroscopes, counterweights, double feedback in the knees — nothing helped. Of course we have no problem there, a man balances his remote naturally!”

I watched the female remotes coming down the conveyor belt, their skin as rosy-white as a baby’s. One after another they were taken by other belts to the packing area, so that we stood under a line of naked women moving steadily over our heads, inert but their long hair swinging as though it were alive. I asked Paridon if he was married.

“Ha, ha, ha! You make a joke, Ijon! I have a wife and children, of course. A shoemaker doesn’t wear the shoes he makes. But we give our workers one a year as a bonus.”

“What workers?” I asked. There were none in the hall. On the assembly line worked robots painted yellow, green, and blue, their articulated arms extending like geometric caterpillars.

“Ha, ha, ha! In the office we still have a few people. And in the sorting room, the control room, the packing department. Uh-oh, a reject! The legs are not quite right. Crooked! Would you like to try one, Ijon? No charge, you can have a week, and we deliver.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not the Pygmalion type.”

“Pygmalion? Ah yes, of course, George Bernard Shaw! I see the allusion. True, some find it repugnant. But you must admit, it’s better to make women than war! Eh?”

“There are still objections,” I said. “I saw the picket line at the gate.”

“Yes. An ordinary woman just can’t compete with one who’s remote. In life, beauty is the exception to the rule, but with us it is the norm! The marketplace, supply and demand, yes, that’s the way of the world…”

We visited the dressing room, which was full of rustling skirts and lingerie and women busy with scissors and tape measures, not very attractive but then they were only live, and I said goodbye to Engineer Paridon, who accompanied me to the parking lot. Tottentanz and Blahouse were strangely quiet on the way back. I didn’t feel like talking either. The day, however, was not finished.

On my return home I found a fat envelope in my mailbox. It contained a book with the title The Unhumanization of Weapon Systems in the Twenty-first Century or Upside-down Evolution. The author’s name, Meslant, told me nothing. It was a heavy book, full of graphs and tables. Having nothing better to do, I sat down and began to read. On the first page, before the introduction, was an epigraph in German:

The author presented himself as an expert in contemporary military history. His subject, the new pacifism at the close of the twentieth century: it was prosperity and cowardice that gave birth to the unhumanization of war. People were increasingly reluctant to be fired upon, and this loss of martial spirit was directly proportional to the standard of living. The youth of wealthy nations weren’t interested in the noble motto Duke et decorum est pro patria mori. And it was just at that time that prices began falling in the intellectronics industry. Microprocessing elements called chips were replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes, mainly Silicobacterium logicum wieneri, named after the father of cybernetics. A handful of these elements cost no more than a handful of barley. Thus artificial intelligence grew cheap, yet the price of new weapons increased geometrically. In the first world war a plane cost as much as a car, in the second as much as twenty, and by the end of the century it was six hundred times more. It was calculated that in seventy years a superpower would be able to afford from eighteen to twenty-two planes. The falling curve of the cost of intelligence and the rising curve of the cost of weapons intersected, and at that point began the unhumanization of the armies. The military became unliving. At which juncture the world went through two crises. The first was when the price of oil soared, the second when shortly thereafter it plunged. The classic rules of economics went out the window, but few understood what was happening, or that the image of a soldier in uniform and helmet charging with bayonet was becoming as distant as the medieval knight in armor. Out of inertia the engineers continued to make big-gauge weapons for a while: tanks, cannon, carriers, and other fighting machines to be used by men, though already these could have gone into battle themselves, without them. Then followed a phase of accelerated miniaturization. Until now all weaponry had been fashioned to fit man: Tailored to his anatomy and physiology, so that he could kill and be killed.

As is usually the case in history, no one saw what lay ahead, for the discoveries which were to make possible the unhumanization of weapons took place in fields of science far from one another. Intellectronics produced microcomputers as cheap as grass, and neuroentomology finally solved the riddle of social insects who live and work together, communicating in their own language, even though bees, for example, have a nervous system 380,000 times smaller than a human brain. The intelligence of a bee is quite sufficient for a foot soldier, as military prowess and intelligence are two different things, at least on the battlefield. The major factor in the push for miniaturization was the atom bomb. The need to miniaturize came from simple facts, but facts that lay outside the military knowledge of the day. Seventy million years ago a huge meteor hit Earth and chilled its climate for centuries, making the dinosaurs defunct but hardly bothering insects and not even touching bacteria. The lesson of paleontology was clear: the greater the destructive force, the smaller the systems that escape it. The atom bomb required the particularization of both soldier and army. But in the twentieth century the idea of making soldiers the size of ants was only a fantasy. You could not reduce people in size or diffuse them. So thought was given to robot soldiers, humanoid, though even then that was a naive anachronism. Industry was unhumanizing itself, but the robots who replaced workers on the assembly line were not made in the likeness of men; they were, rather, human parts selected and enlarged: a brain with a big steel hand or a brain with eyes. But giant robots had no place on an atomic battlefield. So radioactive synsects (synthetic insects) were developed, and ceramic shellfish, and titanium worms able to burrow in the earth and come out after the blast. Flying synsects were airplane, pilot, and missiles all in one tiny entity. The operational unit became a microarmy, fighting only as a whole, much as a swarm of bees acts as a unit to survive while an individual bee is nothing. Thus microarmies of many, kinds were made, on two opposing principles. An army based on the principle of independence proceeded like a column of ants or a cloud of germs or hornets. An army based on the principle of teletopism, however, was an enormous flying or crawling collection of self-assembling elements; according to need, tactical or strategic, it could reach its target in extreme attenuation only to condense there into its programmed whole. The simplest example was the self-dispersing atomic warhead. An ICBM could be tracked, from space by satellite or from Earth using radar; but it was impossible to detect a cloud of infinitesimal particles of uranium or plutonium at very low density, which finally would converge and reach critical mass at its target, a factory or an enemy city.

For a while the old and new weapons coexisted, but the massive machines soon succumbed to the invisible micro. As germs secretly enter an animal organism and kill it from within, so did these unliving microbes penetrate cannon barrels, shell chambers, the engines of tanks and planes, and eat through metal, and detonate the ammunition inside. What could a brave, grenade-carrying soldier do against a microscopic, unliving adversary? He would be like a doctor trying to fight a virus with a hammer. Against an autonomous cloud programmed to destroy all things biological a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary standing with sword and shield before a rain of bullets.