Mark Milley and Eric Schmidt write an article in Foreign Affairs entitled, America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future.
In this article they state that the US is far behind other countries when it comes to robotic warfare. I’m a little confused because Israel, our ally, is far ahead. Given that we send Israel billions of dollars in armaments, Israel’s superiority in attacking Hamas, plus the recent so-called successful cell pager detonation in Lebanon, it doesn’t seem logical that we would be behind.
Do we get nothing in return?
Furthermore, we’ve heard this song and dance from the military leadership before – many times.
It seems we are always behind, and yet we always seem to come out ahead.
Let’s stipulate though that we are behind, General Milley and Eric Schmidt, both graduates of Princeton, recommend what else? That we should get ahead lest we get our brains beat in by the Axis of Evil.
It sounds logical, yet if we pursue this course of action what kind of world will we create?
Our newly developed technology will of course fall into the hands of non-state terrorists who will be sure to use this against us.
Just as nuclear weapons proliferated so will drones, robots and other AI powered devices. Only now the technology will be be profusely disseminated into small, bad actors, barely visible, and very difficult to ferret out.
Given that eventuality, maybe it’s time to take a different approach.
A war of drones is – like a nuclear war – not winnable. And it very well may lead to a greater catastrophe than is imaginable as the authors rightly point out.
So then, why not take a different tack?
Instead of developing more sophisticated, more deadly drones, why not develop technologies to neutralize said drones, robots and other AI driven killing machines.
They operate and depend upon chips and its implicit transmission of electrical impulses, yes? It’s a good bet they do.
What is needed then are devices, flying or stationary, that can knock out such drones with an electromagnetic pulse, directed high frequency sound waves or other technology.
Such a device might also be able to fry or otherwise confuse the components of a nuclear warhead preventing it from being detonated.
Why shouldn’t we develop such technology?
The alternative is far worse.
Automatic AI driven robo-dogs equipped with super-UZIs can knock out a thousand humans in a few minutes.
Is that a world we want to gift to future generations?
The time is now to shut down AI for military use against human beings.
The PDE, the personal digital explosive, those pager cocktails that Israel developed, will seem quaint and ineffective if we do nothing.
To prevent this let us recommend a different approach for our military:
Keep us safe not by killing people but by killing the devices that surely can wipe us off the planet.
Sorry, Mark and Eric, but, you must adapt to the potentially catastrophic new world you have created.
If we follow your approach, by making more sophisticated killing machines, our opponents will in time leapfrog over us, keeping us perpetually behind.
This is a nightmare scenario.
The purpose of a military is not to win wars or to maintain US dominance (as your Princeton macho consciusness dictates) but to maintain some semblance of law and order in a crazy world.
If we can accomplish such by wiping out the machines that will surely do us in we owe it to ourselves to try.
As distasteful as I find the concept of creating another governing body to hassle us, it may be necessary to fashion a new world government (with teeth) to handle problems such as these.
Maybe the time has come to end the arms race permanently.
If the states within the United States can live peacefully, why can’t the nations of the world?
They certainly can, and so can we.
We’re aduts ; we can do anyting we want to do.
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I don’t know if there is something in the water in New Jersey, but it is important for us to remmeber that the following people hail from Princeton:
Woodrow Wilson
John Foster Dulles
Allen Dulles
James Baker
And now these two.
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Cowboy Archer 
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