'The beginning of post-human history' is booting up

By: By Steve Wishnevsky | JOURNAL BOOK REVIEWER
Published: July 12, 2009

WIRED FOR WAR: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. By P.W. Singer. Penguin Press. 512 pages. $29.95.

This is perhaps the most important book that one can read at this point in time. There is a quote here that calls this era "The beginning of post-human history." That is a large concept to ponder.

To the extent that history is the record of war, then history is at a cusp. One could rephrase the old saw, "Those who refuse to study the future will be condemned to try to survive it in ignorance."

P.W. Singer, the author and youngest senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Obama campaign's defense-policy coordinator, has the acumen to realize that the only possible guide to such a revolution in warfare is the much-maligned genre of science fiction.

The word "robot" is derived from an early work of science fiction. That said, the reader must purge his mind of the Terminator and Azimov's Three Laws. Today's war robots are more properly termed "tele-operated drones," not much more sophisticated than radio-controlled toys.

There is the clear danger. The technology level is low; off-the-shelf hardware can be combined into lethal packages. The Predator Drone and the Packbot bomb-disposal bots can be countered by remote control "suicide bombers." It's a new game that anyone can play.

Robotics is probably the next wave of cultural innovation, but it is happening at a subliminal level. Bill Gates, who knows something about technological innovation, compares the state of robotics today with that of personal computing in 1970. He stresses that successful robots will more closely resemble R2-D2 than C-3P0 or Robbie. Form follows function, and we already have too many allegedly intelligent humanoid beings.

Autonomous machines already sweep our floors, mow our lawns and can even navigate traffic, none of them resembling humans even slightly. A killer robot is more likely to look like a Roomba with a gun than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Singer references the book Ender's Game, in which a young boy commits genocide while playing what he thinks is a video game. The distancing from the gore of conflict via tele-operation is a strong theme in this book; a 9 to 5 commuter in Nevada can kill dozens of Taliban in Pakistan and still make his son's PTA meeting a few hours later. The moral questions involved are profound, and probably insoluble. Jihadists, Singer notes, see robotic warfare as proof of America's cowardice and lack of morality, but they die all the same.

These questions have, of course, been implicit since the invention of artillery, but now have a stronger urgency. It is very difficult to program an autonomous device to recognize the difference between an insurgent and a grandmother, very easy to program it to put a bullet into any object at 98.6 degrees.

So, this is an important book, a very well written and entertaining book, and one whose time is come. The single word that Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate would receive today would not be "plastics;" it would be "robotics."

And it would be no joke.

■ Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.