Slaughterbot Five
We are watching humans being zeroed out from the actual battlefield
World War I was a shocker: all that mechanization of firepower previewed in the US Civil War decades earlier came to complete fruition as though modern militaries had perfected the mass production of dead soldiers. That war was to end all wars.
But WWI also previewed the awesome destructiveness of mass bombing from the air — like when the Germans mass bombed London with their Gotha aircraft in 1917 (the Blitz before the Blitz).
The Interwar Period (1920s and most of the 1930s) was one of great military experimentation, promising the ability to bypass mass killing on the battlefield by taking the fight directly to opponents’ cities and force capitulation that way. In The Shape of Things to Come (later made into the fascinating movie above), H.G. Wells, distraught at the looming reality of a Second World War, leapt mentally ahead to imagine a postwar world ruled by flying men and their great machines (“Air Police”) — in effect acting like the Leviathan that would eventually appear when another of his predictions (atomic power) was unleashed.
But, boy, did we ever collectively test that theory of absolute air power bringing an enemy to heel, best captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a de facto memoir chronicling his near death as a laboring prisoner of war in the fire bombing of Dresden.
Air bombing did not end great power war, but nuclear weapons did, leaving us still with terrorism, civil strife, non-great power war, and superpower interventions in all of the above. Thus, the top-line conflict has been effectively retired (coming up on 80 years in 2025), but the lower-end killing has yet to reach any such apogee of pointlessness …
Until the slaughterbots arrive in Ukraine (so named in this fascinating and well reported New York Times piece today), and we get a clear glimpse of the looming Military Singularly in which unmanned firepower effectively kills the utility of actual personnel on the battlefield.
This has been a theme of mine for a bit now, per the article and slide below.
Coming to a battlefield near India: The Military Singularity
We have reached a point of pointlessness in unmanned warfare, where neither side can accomplish much of anything other than the slaughtering of the opponent’s personnel.
Listen to these stories coming out of the “Silicon Valley” of robot killing that is today’s desperate and supremely inventive Ukraine — a country accelerating world history all on its own.
In a field on the outskirts of Kyiv, the founders of Vyriy, a Ukrainian drone company, were recently at work on a weapon of the future.
To demonstrate it, Oleksii Babenko, 25, Vyriy’s chief executive, hopped on his motorcycle and rode down a dirt path. Behind him, a drone followed, as a colleague tracked the movements from a briefcase-size computer.
Until recently, a human would have piloted the quadcopter. No longer. Instead, after the drone locked onto its target — Mr. Babenko — it flew itself, guided by software that used the machine’s camera to track him.
The motorcycle’s growling engine was no match for the silent drone as it stalked Mr. Babenko. “Push, push more. Pedal to the metal, man,” his colleagues called out over a walkie-talkie as the drone swooped toward him. “You’re screwed, screwed!”
If the drone had been armed with explosives, and if his colleagues hadn’t disengaged the autonomous tracking, Mr. Babenko would have been a goner.
Vyriy is just one of many Ukrainian companies working on a major leap forward in the weaponization of consumer technology, driven by the war with Russia.
We are witnessing the end of sub-strategic warfare and the beginning of an omniveillant state capable of policing its citizens in pervasive, all-consuming ways.
From America’s New Map:
Security is increasingly achieved within and across borders through the state’s surveillance (observing behaviors and communication) and “dataveillance” (analysis of database records). According to noted security expert Kim Taipale, this post-9/11 global phenomenon gives rise to “omniveillance,” or the constant monitoring of all human activity by both public authorities and—per the “know your customer” ruleset—the private sector, which is already highly incentivized to do so solely for push-marketing purposes. It is within this omniveillance dynamic that we spot the fusion of global middle-class consumer and political desires for stability. The merger of these “confidence” requirements cannot be met solely by the North’s traditional military alliances.
As this era’s globalization is vertically consolidated along South-North lines, security increasingly displaces defense. Security leverages surveillance, and effective surveillance depends on access and sensors, the most important of which is a smartphone—the modern data chokepoint blending consumer activity with personal security. Those who own the sensors determine the access. That is the nature of the security competition now underway among our five superpowers, where Apple versus Huawei is a more compelling throughline than US Navy carriers versus China’s carrier-killer missiles.
Back to our scary story:
The most advanced versions of the technology that allows drones and other machines to act autonomously have been made possible by deep learning, a form of A.I. that uses large amounts of data to identify patterns and make decisions. Deep learning has helped generate popular large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, but it also helps make models interpret and respond in real time to video and camera footage. That means software that once helped a drone follow a snowboarder down a mountain can now become a deadly tool.
That gets your attention, doesn’t it?
Now the pivot to domestic:
Some U.S. officials said they worried that the abilities could soon be used to carry out terrorist attacks.
Once they have it, governments will need it big-time and be willing to deploy it pervasively. All it will take is one unmanned 9/11.
Here’s the off-ramp in a nutshell:
Ukraine has “made the logic brutally clear of why autonomous weapons have advantages,” said Stuart Russell, an A.I. scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has warned about the dangers of weaponized A.I. “There will be weapons of mass destruction that are cheap, scalable and easily available in arms markets all over the world.”
As for the elimination of humans from the battlefield? Once one side is in the hole on personnel, the choice is clear:
“Once we reach the point when we don’t have enough people, the only solution is to substitute them with robots,” said Rostyslav, a Saker co-founder who also asked to be referred to only by his first name.
Talk about a “children’s crusade”:
On a hot afternoon last month in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, Yurii Klontsak, a 23-year-old reservist, trained four soldiers to use the latest futuristic weapon: a gun turret with autonomous targeting that works with a PlayStation controller and a tablet.
We are inches away from this Military Singularity:
For now, the gun makers say they do not allow the machine gun to fire without a human pressing a button. But they also said it would be easy to make one that could.
Meanwhile, let the games begin:
Often, battlefield demands pull together engineers and soldiers. Oleksandr Yabchanka, a commander in Da Vinci Wolves, a battalion known for its innovation in weaponry, recalled how the need to defend the “road of life” — a route used to supply troops fighting Russians along the eastern front line in Bakhmut — had spurred invention. Imagining a solution, he posted an open request on Facebook for a computerized, remote-controlled machine gun.
In several months, Mr. Yabchanka had a working prototype from a firm called Roboneers. The gun was almost instantly helpful for his unit.
“We could sit in the trench drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and shoot at the Russians,” he said.
Take a look at your future military industrial base:
I’ve shared this infamous 2017 video in the past and do so again here:
Because it captures the rapid transition to domestic deployment.
Stuart Russell, the AI scientist and Berkeley professor who made the short film (truly brilliant), has the saddest quote in the piece.
What’s happening in Ukraine moves us toward that dystopian future, Mr. Russell said. He is already haunted, he said, by Ukrainian videos of soldiers who are being pursued by weaponized drones piloted by humans. There’s often a point when soldiers stop trying to escape or hide because they realize they cannot get away from the drone.
“There’s nowhere for them to go, so they just wait around to die,” Mr. Russell said.
That is the essence of Slaughterhouse-Five — the waiting around to die.
The piece ends by citing the low odds of any Geneva Conventions-like international agreements arising any time soon.
I honestly don’t think they need to: eliminating humans from the battlespace and replacing them with slaughterbots is the sub-strategic variant of a Leviathan, or a military capability so frightening and overwhelming as to ruin the entire proposition: What is the point of just waiting around to die?
Once the Military Singularly kills sub-strategic war and unleashes a new era of terrorism, this whole dynamic shifts quickly from international conflict to domestic/homeland security.
And THIS is where the difference between living in a democracy ruled by laws or an autocracy ruled by an elite will be of supreme importance.
