JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: AN AUTHOR’S CONCERN OVER POSSIBLE FUTURE MILITARY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MACHINES SEEMS MISPLACED – HOW ABOUT CONCERN WITH ACHIEVABLE MATTERS LIKE AMERICA’S TERRIBLE MILITARY MACHINE TODAY? – OR AMERICA’S APPROACH TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS? – OR AMERICA’S APPROACH TO NUCLEAR TREATIES AND AGREEMENTS? – THE EFFORT TO DOMINATE THE GLOBE? – WE HAVE FAR MORE REAL AND IMMINENT THREATS THAN POSSIBLE FUTURE MACHINES AND, BESIDES, NO POWERFUL EMERGING TECHNOLOGY CAN BE STOPPED WHEN IT IS READY – THE USE OF THE DATED AND INAPPROPRIATE TERM “AMERICAN GI’S”

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MICHAEL T. KLARE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


“US Military Robots on Fast Track to Leadership Role”

“It’s time for Congress to ask tough questions about automating combat decision-making before pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into the enterprise”


The author’s "American GIs" is a dated and inappropriate phrase.

Its use calls up the notion of citizen soldiers in WWII, cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s sentimental soldiers.

But that's not what you have today at all in America.

You have a gigantic mercenary army, murderously well-equipped, with bases in 800 to 1,000 places, and it is used against people who have not attacked or threatened the United States. It is even organized along some especially ferocious lines like special forces.

You know, the special forces that in Vietnam used to go out at night, crawling into villages on their bellies to slit the throats of village eiders and officials with big knives?

It was called Operation Phoenix, was run under the guidance of the CIA, and at least 40,000 people were executed in that fashion.

Never mind distractions over a fantasy future of military machines. Anyway, no one ever stopped a powerful new technology from emerging when it was ready.

If ever there were a good candidate for doing that, it was nuclear weapons, but instead what do we see? Over fifteen thousand of them in nine countries, and a country like the United States updating its arsenal with new “more usable” ones whose yield can be dialed up or down like the suction on a vacuum cleaner.

What about just focusing on something more achievable, like stopping the killing and destruction America practices right now around the globe? If that malicious activity were ended, there would a much more promising environment for dealing with new threats.

America also is the world’s greatest arms dealer, by far, dumping huge quantities of sophisticated weapons into precarious regions like the Middle East. That hardly benefits the cause of peace or genuine security.

And still further on the matter of nuclear weapons, over many decades we had some limited success in controlling deployment and proliferation through various hard-won treaties and agreements. But even those are now being eaten away, piece by piece (INF, Open Skies, Space Weapons Treaty, and now Start) by a United States eager and determined to dominate the globe.

What can you say about such a philosophy? It is far more real and imminent a threat than some possible future machines.