Robot Overload. Please Don't Fire Us.
From early B.C. cavemen era to today’s 21st century technological era, warfare is one aspect that has always existed in world history. The early colonization era, birthed technological advancement that promoted growth of automation and lead to the booming years of industrial science. War can put an enormous amount of demand upon a nation’s resources. These resources include anything from improving weapons to perfecting efficiency, to protecting the nation from war by hiring physical men to do the fighting (soldiers). Even though war is said to be a burden upon a nation, there are beneficial effects on the nation’s economy and technological development. Wars tend to accelerate technologyical progression. It is not by coincidence that the computers we are using today were first created as military tools. Colossus, the world’s first electronic digital computer programmed to decrypt high-level, encrypted German army’s messages during World War II (1944), evolved into a non-military device we have access to everyday, also known as computers. Fast forward to present, the rapid technology revolution that started from our very first programmed computer, had branched off into a new category of science: military technology.
Now, we are not just creating machines that will perform calculations and computations faster and more accurately than any team of humans, but now, we are procreating soldiers as robots. Our military technology has advanced too far and too deep into scientific fantasies and creativities, for us to loose the fine line between realities versus imaginations. Physically, the soldiers may look like human beings, but don’t be fooled by the power of military technology advancement. In an extreme case, we could say that the creation of military technology have brainwashed or controlled the soldier’s mind into an indifferent stage. At this state, the soldiers look perfectly normal on the outside, but they lost their intellectuals or their consciousness to think for themselves. Not physically a robot, but a robot in disguise. A “robot” that is commanded to perform specific actions ordered from the higher up leaders, and not to question whether the soldiers are committing mass murder, or protecting U.S. citizen’s freedom. The next question to ask is: what exactly is military technology and within what range of military technology growth are causing these epidemic numbness to the soldiers’ brains?
Materials created from the evolution of human’s ideas and discoveries have been impacting us in many different ways. Driven by the excitement of new discoveries and designs that over shadows our fears, we have created more greed for better and much more surpassing technology transformations in military technology. When we compare the weapons and machinery from Revolutionary War to World War II, we can see a dramatic change in weaponry power of forces, which collides with the death rates in war. Before the era of military technology boom, basic machinery, like “muskets, pistols, swords, and cannons used in American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), were toys compared to the high powered guns and machineries used in World War II (1939-1945) (Wright). World War II weaponry consisted of machine guns, and the ultimate destructive weapon, the nuclear bombs. And, now, in 21st century, the military automation had grown into a period, where we cannot predict the military technological growth rate. The pace at which military technology is accelerating is alarming. Our fast-paced development will lead us to a future of unknown. The scientists might be creating weapons to win the force of war, but they have not thought of the consequences of their creations before ever building a weapon of mass destruction.
As if military technology now is not good enough to protect our country, the government spends more than half billion dollars of money in creating war-purposed-machines that will destroy human’s intellectual possibilities of right or wrong moral compass. As much as more possibilities open up with newer technological advancements, an equal amount of consequences follow each successful scientific theory. What is worrying us, is not the fact that these military developments are happening rather it's their consequences. We have take to into an account on how these smarter-than-human-beings warfare machines will affect our soldiers. Our contemporary scientific military technology has advanced to help the soldiers create more efficient warfare methods, and smarter ways to go around wars, but in reality, these machines, gadgets, and instruments depresses one soldier’s potentiality and his or her likeliness to think for themselves. In a way, technological advancement had an influence in creating robots in human beings, and the military weaponry creators did not think through of the consequences of constructing soldiers’ mind-controlling machineries. Although military technology is meant to improve warfare efficiency and proficiency of military operations, in reality, the military technology innovation is a catalyst in producing human robot soldiers.
