Machines That Kill People

I am pretty certain that if a button were available that would, upon pressing it, release machines to kill an enemy, plenty of people would be willing press the button.  Certainly the radicalized Muslims in the Middle East would press the button and send machines to annihilate the United States.  Similarly, there are more than a few American who would be willing to press the button and send killing machines to the Middle East, to North Korea, to Russia, and—in some cases—other states comprising this nation.

We are not all that far from having such a button.  In the last couple of years, as illustration, much had been made of the use of unmanned killing drones by our military and by such agencies as the CIA.  Just yesterday, news about CIA drones inadvertently killing hostages held by Al-Qaeda splashed across the world news.  We have every manner of robot performing dangerous missions of surveillance.   All indications are that the next generation of jet fighters will be unmanned.  Dreams of a robotic soldier are not merely science fiction.

I find something particularly chilling about machines attacking men.  I am not yet worried about hordes of machines taking over the planet; but I do worry that we will begin to see war as something of a video game.  War is hell when waged by men, but men on the battlefield sometimes make last second judgments that save innocent lives.  Moments of humanity sometimes alter and limit the bloodshed.

I fully understand the worthy intentions behind unmanned drones, but cooler heads were behind those intentions.  If, on one side of the battlefield, we have nothing but machines and on the other side we have people, what might be the outcome?  What if a bad guy has all the machines?   If we cannot smell the battle, if we never hear screaming, if we see war only on sterile screens: will we fully understand it?   While we may at present fancy this idea of machines killing enemies because we are commanding the machines, a day will likely come when cold machines come for us and we see this differently.      

--Mitchell Hegman