Personalities such as Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, are amongst the 116 experts calling for the ban. “We cannot delay the act,” they say. “Once this Pandora’s box is uncovered, it will be hard to close.” But such practices are arguably already here, such as the “unmanned combat air vehicle” Taranis produced by BAE and others, or the autonomous SGR-A1 sentinel gun made by Samsung and used along the South Korean border. Autonomous tanks are in the crafts, while human control of deadly drones is growing just an element of degree.
Yet killer robots have stayed with us in spirit for as long as robots themselves. Karel Čapek’s 1920 play RUR –Rossum’s Universal Robots gave the word. His humanoid robots, created by the eponymous organization for industrial work, rebel, and killing the human race. They’ve been making it ever since, from Cybermen to the Terminator. Robot stories rarely end well.
It’s hard to still think about the problems raised by Musk and his co-signatories without a robot apocalypse rising in the background. Even if the end of mankind isn’t at stake, we just recognize that one of these robots is going to fail with the messy outcomes of Omni Consumer Product’s policemen droid in Robocop.
Such statements could seem to get a light of a deadly serious subject. OK, so a robot Armageddon might not be specifically foolish, but these novels, for all that they bring on deep-seated human fears, are eventually entertainment. It’s all too easy, though, for a discussion like this to fall into the polarisation of good and bad technologies that science-fiction films can help, with the attendant assumption that, so long as we dodge the really bad ones, all will be well.
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