Transcript
PETER SINGER: As we pull back from the story about one PacBot, it is easy to miss today that something bigger is going on in war. Let's talk about the numbers here. We went into Iraq with just a handful of unmanned systems in the air and now have 5,300. We went into Iraq with zero unmanned systems on the ground. We now have 12,000 in the inventory. And these are just the first generation. They are the Model T Fords compared to what is already on the prototype stage. And, yes, the tech industry term of a killer application does not just describe what iPods did to the music industry. The ones of these robots who are coming to a battlefield near you soon won't just pack a lethal armory of missiles, rockets, and machine guns, but they are going to be able to make their own decisions on when and where to use force. So for all the arguments you hear out there as one security analyst put it to me that, "Iraq proved how technology don't have a big place in any doctrine of future war," the reality is far different. As one robot company executive described to their Pentagon customers, "The user perception changed overnight from we don't want robots to holy crap, we can't do without them."
That is what is happening right now. Peering forward, one Air Force Lieutenant General that I interviewed forecast that, "Given the growth trends, it's not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands of robots." Let's be clear here. We are talking not about tens of thousands of robots with the capabilities of today, but tens and thousands or robots with the capability of tomorrow because you have operative Moore's Law, basically that the power that can be packed into a microchip roughly doubles every 2 years. So when you calculate that out it means in roughly 25 years they will be a billion times more powerful than today, and we are not using billion in the Austin Powers billion sense, we literally mean a billion times. What this means is that what was once only fodder for science fiction conventions now has to be talked about seriously in the world of politics and war. A robotics revolution may well be at hand. I need to be clear here. I am not talking about the fact that you need to watch out for the governor of California showing up at your door. This is a different kind of robots revolution. Indeed, when historians look back at this period they are going to conclude that we are at the start of the greatest revolution in warfare since the introduction of the atomic bomb.
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