by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Singer, P. W., Wired for War. The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century, The Penguin Press, 2009.
(Singer 2009).
Peter Warren Singer
This is a work about the robotisation of war, written from a specialist of this field. “Soldiers”, also police officers, will be progressively totally replaced from robots. Manned devices will become unmanned, as it is already visible in various battlefields and contexts. Physical “soldiers”, as well as similar operators, will inevitable move to different levels of the operational theatre, from the construction and predisposition to the government of warbots (war robots).
Actually, also the battlefield will inevitably assume a different, broader dimension, in a kind of total war in which key element will be the identification and immediate neutralisation or liquidation of whatever enemy.
All that is not without problems. Both for using warbots and for contrasting them, key elements will become, in addition to the disposal of adequate technology, the knowledge of bureaucratic procedures (for example, how the enemy is organised, thinks and operates), how warbots think and operate, creative and lateral thinking overall at direction levels.
Are and will be “soldiers”, and who helps them, too idiotic for playing robotised war “games”? See Afghanistan, for example.
Singer, P. W., Wired for War. The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century, The Penguin Press, 2009.
