Ender’s Game: A Fictional Future That The US Military Is Terrifyingly Close To Realizing -- Extreme Tech
[This story containers spoilers. If you haven't read the book Ender's Game, or you're saving yourself for the movie, you should probably leave this page now.]
In his book Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card envisioned a not-so-distant future where intergalactic war is waged and won by child soldiers. Unlike today’s idea of child soldiers, though, where military regimes equip children with rifles and send them off to war to kill and be killed, in Ender’s Game the battles occur inside a simulator, where no physical harm can befall the kid. It doesn’t take a genius to see the parallels between this, and the US military’s move towards UAVs and combat robots that are controlled by soldiers who are hundreds or thousands of miles away from the battlefront.
These American soldiers, though, are adult; adults with free will, ethics, and the ability to critically question whether it’s right to blow up an enemy combatant with a Hellfire missile. Wouldn’t it be so much more efficient, though, if the US military instead used children to control its killer arsenal of unmanned drones and robots? Not only are children faster, but more importantly they’re not lumbered down by morals, critical thinking, and other pesky adult mental processes. If you tell a child to do something, perhaps under physical or psychological duress if you need to ensure compliance, they will do it. Or, if you’re of the sappy persuasion, the US military could just take a leaf out of Ender’s Game and trick the children into thinking that they’re playing a game instead of fighting a real war.
Read more ....
My Comment: Some hard questions are being asked in this essay .... and it is true .... as armies become more robotized and dependent on drones .... should children (who are masters at using this tech) be the ones at the switch.
No comments:
Post a Comment