You’ve got to love Michio Kaku. The smiling American physicist knows the answer to everything, and because he does, he appears in every single science documentary these days — at least those produced by the Discovery Channel.
Kaku’s 2009–10 series Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, currently showing on German TV, underscores the extent to which science fiction inspires today’s engineers. Obviously, we’re still a long way away from some of the advanced ideas like teleportation and time travel, but we’re much closer to things like saving Earth from an asteroid collision and being able to make objects invisible. Kaku is optimistic that, given enough time, humanity will be able to do almost anything that doesn’t directly violate the laws of physics.
The descriptions of two episodes in particular may, however, give one pause: “Dr. Kaku plans to create a unified cyborg army to take on the forces of evil, using his training experience in the US Army” is one. Then, in the next episode: “Michio Kaku comes up with a plan to stop the robots from taking over Earth.”
The Terminator movies originally had the robot uprising happening on August 29, 1997, so we’re a little behind schedule. Robots have turned out to be a lot clumsier and less intelligent than we imagined. In fact, the writers of Terminator 3 in 2003 had to resort to circular logic to make their story work: a Terminator from the future gives our military hardware the necessary instructions.
Nonetheless, the US military is already a high-tech fighting force. It strikes at night, when it can see better than its adversaries. Its soldiers carry laptops to collect and receive information, even during battle. Not least, it uses cruise missiles and drones wherever possible in order not to endanger the lives of its own soldiers.
The CIA and military under Barack Obama have relied to an unprecedented extent on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to knock out “targets” in the hinterlands of Pakistan and Yemen. For five years now, Obama’s critics in Congress have been very vocal in criticizing military strikes at the push of a button, asking who decides who lives and who dies on the basis of a blurry aerial photograph.
Just what all this implies was revealed in John Kerry’s testimony before Congress last week. Asked why he believed the president could order an attack on Syria on his own, Kerry said, “We don’t believe we are going to war, in the classic sense of taking American troops and America to war.”
Syria might see that a bit differently. However, Kerry and General Martin Dempsey, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were confident that the American ships that would launch the missiles would be too far away for Syria to hit them back.
Even Kerry acknowledged in an offhand remark that at some point, the situation in Syria would have to be solved on the ground. Either the Syrian “oppositionists” (Kerry’s word) would have to gain the upper hand, or the Basher (King Bashar al-Assad) would have to agree to negotiations.
Soon there will be another way. The next war fought by the United States on the ground may be the first robot war.
While robots are not yet autonomous and won’t be firing the shots, they will be carrying heavy loads, jumping onto roofs, flying through windows, gathering information and potentially helping wounded soldiers or even civilians. A soldier’s best friend won’t be his buddy; it’ll be his robot.
That’s the first step, anyway. In a few years’ time, when the robots are more intelligent, outfitted with facial-recognition technology and information from the NSA, they might start suggesting targets on their own.
We’ll see if Michio Kaku has a solution for that.
