Fully autonomous weapons aren’t just the third revolution in warfare, they’re the manifestation of everything that has gone wrong with technology.
To read or listen to this entire essay, please go to: https://khmezek.substack.com/p/killer-robots-video-games-and-artificial
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This is a wild one so, buckle up and get ready!
We are the masters of artificial intelligence!
If you doubt it, check out the video below. Look how these robot dogs do the bidding of their controllers. It must be a powerful feeling, to have created all those robot dogs and watch them perform on command.
In fact, robot dogs are so obedient, the military thinks it’s a good idea to do this:
What happens when packs of robot dogs roam free after having been fed an algorithm by their masters. But who might those masters be? We worry about robots going rogue. Maybe we should worry first about who is programming them.
With drones like these becoming cheaper by the day, it could be the kid down the street. Forget about last week when loners who are bullied in school dreamed of shooting up their teachers and schoolmates, tomorrow they will be sending drones into your backyard to attack your children playing there. Or maybe flying through your window as you sleep at night and blowing you to smithereens.
Video games just got one step closer to reality. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s hard to tell anymore. Video games are a big part of most children’s lives and have been for years. Despite having age restrictions, most kids are so computer savvy, they can access almost anything on the internet and their parents never have a clue. The media has been conditioning children to think of violence as nothing more than a game on a screen.
- Since 1996 Harvester’s plot line has an amnesiac player-character Steve Mason coerced by a mysterious organization into performing tasks that result in increasingly brutal violence.
- As one of the very first horror-themed video games, Texas Chainsaw Massacre puts the player in the role of Leatherface, tasked with chasing down and murdering victims. The game has scenes such as a character’s head getting split open and another where a character’s scalp is removed to reveal their brain underneath.
- Grand Theft Auto gamers immerse themselves in the underworld, where stealing cars (beating hookers in order to get your money back after having sex with them) and killing police officers are the way to win.
- In Carmaggedon, killing all the pedestrians in a level was an alternative way to beat each race, meaning the game rewards the player for following their violent urges.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2‘s gamers have the option to slaughter innocent civilians in an airport (in order to avoid exposing yourself as an undercover agent).
- Mortal Combat has been around since 1992 and is more popular now than ever. In 2019 the franchise was listed as worth $12 billion.
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According to Game Rant:
At least one Mortal Kombat 11 developer has been diagnosed with PTSD after working on the game. This person, who chose to remain anonymous, had to spend large portions of their day constantly watching violent and gory animations. This person was also surrounded by “bloody real-life research material” that the animators referred to when recreating gore in Mortal Kombat 11.
“I’d have these extremely graphic dreams, very violent,” he said. “I kind of just stopped wanting to go to sleep, so I’d just keep myself awake for days at a time, to avoid sleeping.”
If a developer suffers in this way, imagine what hours upon hours of playing these games does to an impressionable young mind.
Is it not obvious that the whole idea is to make violence a game. It’s something that happens on a screen. You can be the one in control. You can inflict the violence and it’s perfectly acceptable. All you need to care about is winning.
All of this has made it perfectly acceptable to create weapons that can make up their own minds to kill us.
Welcome to Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs)
LAWs have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. They can select and engage targets without human intervention.
Slaughterbots sound like something from a video game, but they’re real.
Slaughterbots are weapons that “select and apply force to targets without human intervention”. They make their decisions about who to kill based on a series of algorithms. We are now in a world where “the sort of unavoidable algorithmic errors that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now lead to the elimination of whole cities,” warns Prof James Dawes of Macalester College.
LAWs can seek out our hot bodies and recognize our faces. They can decide who is the enemy and kill discriminately.
Imagine fleeing the 15-minute city you’ve been confined to and forming a community of like-minded individuals out in the middle of nowhere, rejecting technology and living off the land. How long will it be before a pack of robot dogs, or a swarm of robot insects find you, having determined you are terrorists, and you must be eliminated.
To read or listen to this entire essay, please go to: https://khmezek.substack.com/p/killer-robots-video-games-and-artificial
To read and listen to all my essays, articles and interviews, please subscribe at: https://khmezek.substack.com/
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