Justine Jablonska/MEDILL
A crowd-pleasing iRobot Boeing 320 SUGV presents flowers to an audience member; the military uses these unmanned ground vehicles for scoping out unknown terrain, going places where soldiers can’t (or shouldn’t) go.
Justine Jablonska/MEDILL
An iRobot 510 PackBot says hello.
Justine Jablonska/MEDILL
These iRobot 510 PackBots are used on such dangerous missions as bomb disposal.
Justine Jablonska and Abby Sewell/MEDILL
This Aurora SUAS (small unmanned aircraft system) is about a year old and in the user feedback stage. Aurora says they hope these’ll be ready to ship out in six months.
Justine Jablonska and Abby Sewell/MEDILL
A smaller Aurora unmanned aircraft system flies around the conference room.
WASHINGTON — “We’re not quite at the Terminator stage yet, but we’re getting there very, very quickly.”
David Plotz, editor of Slate magazine opened a conference at the Army and Navy Club in Washington Monday with those words, which the listener might take as either ominous or inspiring.
A robot shared the floor with him, but unlike the cyborg-assassin immortalized by Arnold Schwarzenneger in the Terminator movies, this robot came in peace. Its mission: to hand a bouquet of flowers to the tallest redhead in the room.
Plotz was leading into a day of panel discussions between military officers, scientists, academics and journalists on the rapid evolution of new technologies in warfare and the implications for logistical and ethical decisions both on the battlefield and in civilian life.
The discussion was the first in a series of events to be put on by Future Tense, a new partnership between the New America Foundation think tank, Slate magazine and Arizona State University that focuses on the impacts of emerging technologies on society and public policy.
Joel Garreau, an ASU law professor and author who helped to organize the conference, said the time was ripe in Washington to begin talking about the cultural implications of military technology advances, from drones to bioengineering. Until now, Garreau said, those conversations have been largely restricted to academia.
“The object of the game was to try to talk about subjects that Washington wasn’t really talking about but was ripe to,” he said.
There are already about 9,000 robots at work in Iraq and Afghanistan, said panelist Vice Adm. Joseph W. Dyer, a retired Navy officer who now heads up the government and industrial robots division of iRobot Corp. Some of them patrol the air, while others hunt for improvised explosive devices on the ground.
Does that mean that one day robot warriors will patrol the ground with assault rifles? Dyer said we will almost certainly see armed robots, although he believes a human will always need to make the final call on whether to take a human life.
And that’s only the beginning. Among the other developments the panelists said we might see are biologically enhanced soldiers, robots controlled by humans via brain implants, helmets that allow people to communicate telepathically, even – a nod at Harry Potter – cloaks that allow the wearer to blend into his surroundings.
Like jet planes, lasers, and other technologies that began in the military, the new developments will inevitably make their way into the civilian world, opening a whole new Pandora’s box of questions about safety and access.
“It’s not clear how this (current new technology) transforms society,” Garreau said. “What is clear is that there hasn’t been a transformation of the military that hasn’t transformed the world in almost unimaginable ways.”
For more information and to see video of the event, see http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/warring_futures_a_future_tense_event.