The
human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change
that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond
recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying
attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding
human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end
of the Age of the Gun.
You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.
That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity.
You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.
That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity.
For
centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the
battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to
motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning
the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the
near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the
human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always,
that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.
The
advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train.
In the modern day, it’s true that bombers, tanks, and artillery can lay
waste to infantry—but those industrial tools of warfare are just so
expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter industrialized nations
from fighting protracted conflicts. Look at how much it cost the United
States to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, versus how much it
cost our opponents. The hand-held firearm reached its apotheosis with
the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon,
guerrilla armies can still defy the mightiest nations on Earth.
The
Age of the Gun is the age of People Power. The fact that guns don’t
take that long to master means that most people can learn to be decent
gunmen in their spare time. That’s probably why the gun is regarded as
the ultimate guarantor of personal liberty in America—in the event that
we need to overthrow a tyrannical government, we like to think that we
can put down our laptops, pick up our guns, and become an invincible
swarm.
Of
course, it doesn’t always work out that way. People Power has often
been used not for freedom, but to establish nightmarish tyrannies, in
the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and elsewhere. But Stalin, Mao, and their
ilk still had to win hearts and minds to hold power; in the end, when
people wised up, their nightmare regimes were reformed into something
less horrible.
But
another turning point in the history of humankind may be on the
horizon. Continuing progress in automation, especially continued cost
drops, may mean that someday soon, autonomous drone militaries become
cheaper than infantry at any scale.
Note that what we call drones right now are actually just remote-control weapons, operated by humans. But that may change. The United States Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers with true autonomous robots. The proposal is for the robots to be used in supply roles only, but that will obviously change in the long term. Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves.
Note that what we call drones right now are actually just remote-control weapons, operated by humans. But that may change. The United States Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers with true autonomous robots. The proposal is for the robots to be used in supply roles only, but that will obviously change in the long term. Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves.
Meanwhile,
technological advances and cost drops in robotics continue apace. It is
not hard to imagine swarms of agile, heavily armed quadrotor drones
flushing human gunmen out of buildings and jungles, while hardened
bunkers are busted with smart munitions from cheap high-altitude robot
blimps. (See this video if your imagination needs assistance.)
The
day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is
the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few
will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the
tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to
shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please,
but the Robot Lords will have the guns.
Forever.
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Where
this scenario really gets scary is when it combines with economic
inequality. Although few people have been focusing on robot armies, many
people have been asking what happens
if robots put most of us out of a job. The final, last-ditch response
to that contingency is income redistribution – if our future is to get
paid to sit on a beach, so be it.
But
with robot armies, that’s just not going to work. To pay the poor, you
have to tax the rich, and the Robot Lords are unlikely to stand for
that. Just imagine Tom Perkins with an army of cheap autonomous drones. Or Greg Gopman. We’re all worried about the day that the 1% no longer need the 99%–but what’s really scary is when they don’t fear the 99% either.
Take
a look at countries where the government makes its money from natural
resources instead of human labor–Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran. Look at the
money and effort those governments spend making sure their people don’t
rebel. What will those countries look like when repression starts
getting cheaper and cheaper? And why will America and Europe and East
Asia be different? Isn’t a nation where the rich can get everything they
need from robots essentially suffering from the same “resource curse”
as Saudi Arabia?
When
we think of the “rise of the robots,” we usually think of Skynet and
Agent Smith–the evil of artificial intelligence. But that’s not who we
should be worrying about. A.I.’s–if they ever exist–may or may not have any reason to dominate, marginalize, or slaughter humanity. But we know that humans often
like to do those things. Humans already exist, and we know many of them
are evil. It’s the Robot Lords we should be afraid of, not Skynet.
Libertarians,
anarcho-capitalists, and rugged individualists have always based their
visions of a capitalist paradise on the idea that the state is the main
threat to the power and freedom of the individual. And in the Age of
the Gun, that was true. But in the Age of the Drone, that is no longer
the case. When the rich hold unlimited military power in their own two
hands, who’s going to stop them from just taking the property of
everyone else? If you’re a card-carrying National Rifle Association
member, you should ask yourself whether you’re going to be one of the
Robot Lords … or one of the rest.
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We
can carry this dystopian thought exercise through to its ultimate
conclusion. Imagine a world where gated communities have become
self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich,
Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot
armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity
teeters on the edge of starvation. They can’t farm the land or mine for
minerals, because the invincible robot swarms guard all the farms and
mines. Their only hope is to catch the attention of the Robot Lords
inside the cantonments, either by having enough rare talent to be
admitted as a Robot Lord, or by becoming a novelty slave for a little
while.
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