“Many people find the idea of robotic soldiers and robotic moral agents to be somewhat fantastical, the stuff of science fiction and not something that deserves serious consideration.” (Asaro)
I often find myself in this same boat when explaining to people that I’m studying, among other technological warfare issues, the idea of autonomous robots fighting in wars. Almost every time I mention such a thing (this is I’m sure a microcosm of what you’ve encountered professionally over the years), people laugh or smile and make a reference to RoboCop or the X-Files (with their biologically developed alien-human hybrid “super-soldiers” and also I think actually robot ones in the later Mulder-less seasons). In any case, it’s interesting to see this being an important part of the opening of a serious academic article about a topic that should chill people to their bones and instead still seems to leave people chuckling and not very interested.
I think this speaks to some of the lack of public consideration of Drone warfare, and of the rise of technological warfare. People who would consider themselves Hawks or big on USA defense naturally fall in line with the idea of getting boots off the ground and preventing human casualties on our side, not to mention the idea of our Military might being added to in a big way by our relative advancement when it comes to military robotics. On the other side you might have a Dove-type, or at least someone critical of warfare and state intervention abroad, and someone interested in preventing items like Nuclear weapons from spelling out the end of the world. In that category there seems to be an ambivalence about robots and AI, both seeming so far in the future, and just another brick in the wall of Military excesses. But there is something new here, and you point it out better than anyone else I’ve read.
Turning to a later piece, I was struck by the Moral Injury question, on a personal level. Although the details have been sparse (I am still picking his brain for a better understanding), my Father was involved in Military Intelligence in Vietnam, and thus experienced something along these lines, distinct from his comrades in the war who were on the front lines, to whom violence and first-hand bloodshed took a traumatic effect. After leaving the war, he worked in Panama spying on Columbian Generals for the NSA, but left after his 4 years were up. In the subsequent years, he was greatly affected, and had many of the same symptoms that other men coming home from Vietnam experienced, but they tended to be more abstract. My mother reports him speaking about troop movements and “lines” and where bombs needed to be dropped in his nighttime terrors, where he would wake up and smash something or jump out of bed. I never knew this term and it really is a clarification for me, and something I may bring up with him in the future when asking him about his time.
Digital War 2016 