Inspired by US Military to be 30% robotic in 12 years.

Version 3 is here.

Billions of dollars of R&D money are going into robots designed to win the war that the Founding Fathers imagined the population might one day have to fight against the government, and the clock is ticking on the complete destabilization of the balance of power between the American people and their government.

We have as long as it takes the military to develop effective combat robots to win our freedom.

After that, we’re done.

The weak link has always been the unwillingness of the population who have enlisted or been drafted to do evil. I do not believe that the evil inherent in designing and manufacturing a robot for oppression is sufficiently visceral to stop people doing it in numbers large enough to prevent the fabrication of robot “police” and soldiers (weapons) who will enforce inhuman policies on at least some populations.

You may say that it cannot be done. It can. The first generations may well phone home to command centers with human operators for a lot of judgement calls, but a riot control robot need not be terribly sophisticated: mace, net and ID anybody who enters this area. It’s so much easier than that if lethal force is authorized. From policy to enforcement with minimal human frailty (including mercy) is the goal: nothing more, and nothing less. Protect the troops, indeed.

You see, turning people into machines, into instruments of state, has been the essence of government for a long time – military scientists are cogs in the machine, soldiers that train to be heroes are cogs in the machine. Soldiers lose perspective of the moral issues that their role exposes them to under the veil of “just following orders.” Police train to suppress crime, and crime gradually broadens to include abortion, or growing your own marijuana to control your appetite loss or just because you prefer it to alcohol, and eventually it becomes criminal to express a political opinion contrary to the status quo. 1984 is about how people are made machines, and you just take a look at the world for a moment, as it sprouts endless eyes and ears, and the governments assert their right to look at anything a machine sees, to hear anything a machine hears… Not even in 1984 did the government use your own cell phone as a bug to listen to the room you are in at any time it pleases, whether or not you are making a phone call.

You begin to understand why we have to get this done in one generation? We have at most 15 years to tear down the regimes which would abuse the power of state through automated, mass-produced oppression. We must prevent policy being implemented by robotic mass-produced depersonalized political and social violence against the general public. That’s what robots will do in the hands of governments, because what governments want is machines to implement their policies by violence. That is what they are paying to develop, and that is what they will get: automated enforcement. We have one generation to stop this.

One generation. Our generation.

The Pentagon is pouring money into robot war right now. They clearly see the need for it – after all, a population in Iraq armed with only rifles and improvised bombs has ground the American military machine to a standstill in many ways.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
(cite)

As you can see in Iraq, the government of Iraq was defeated in a couple of weeks. The war against the Iraqi government was short, it was effective, it was a war between unequal forces with a predictable and final result: the government of Iraq was gone.

The government is a high level emergent structure. It has a visible form – people, a chain of command, buildings, but all that was swiftly and effectively overcome or destroyed. The “monopoly on legitimate use of force” rapidly passed to the American military, and then… something happened…

The people of Iraq started shooting.

Now, at this point, we’re going to take the gloves all the way off. The US military has been fighting a war against the people of Iraq. The Iraqi “militias” are directly equivalent to the a well regulated militia that the Founding Fathers discussed as the last line of defense against government oppression – US government oppression. The fact that this oppression is occurring in Iraq rather than on US soil does not change the role of the inevitable logic of guns as tools of self-determination. The Second Amendment is guarantee of a right, but that right is based in observable reality. It is operating in Iraq today, and the streets run with blood as people exercise their right to die and kill for what they believe, however misguided it may be.

The Iraqi people are demonstrating the Second Amendment. It turns out to work pretty well: 18 million people have turned out to contain a large enough population of stubborn bastards who will not submit to US authority to make the country more-or-less ungovernable for years. They also rejected the authority of the regime the US allowed to be elected in Iraq. The loss of life, the waste of potential, the meaninglessness of the destruction are undeniable, but that is why they call it war: those things can be minimized but never prevented.

What you are seeing in Iraq is a Second Amendment War. Make no mistake about that – it is small arms and improvised munitions on one hand, and massive State power on the other. It is much like the British in America suppressing the revolutionaries in fact, but America is now on the other side of the equation, playing the role of the Empire rather than the scrappy upstarts. And do not confuse this understanding of the situation with support for the Iraqi militias – no, by and large, I find these people and their values detestable, given that I believe in individual rights and those rights do not exist in theocracies or warlord-states such as those the average Iraqi insurgent is fighting to create. We are discussing methods here, not goals.

So the response to this Second Amendment type problem at the Pentagon is to fund the development of weapons systems which are capable of defeating the Iraqi population, with their rifles and improvised bombs, so that the next population that chooses to resist the US military can be swiftly and effectively defeated. What this effort will do, if it is successful, is defang the population, overthrow the protective effect of the Second Amendment, and unbalance the Constitution (or what remains of it) permanently. It is the one blow that the Constitution cannot recover from: bad laws can be unmade, and unjust men can be hanged, but once the technologies to upend the Constitution exist, it is indeed finished.

Weapons can be returned to the population, but once the robots are here, those weapons cannot be made effective, and the balance of power between government and the armed citizenry will be gone forever.

We have until those technologies are developed to regain control of government. And I don’t just mean the US government, I mean government period. Because these technologies are coming, and if we do not stop them, by the time you and I are old, we’ll see robots on street corners with guns that run software we do not control, implementing policies beamed to them over the airwaves in encrypted communications, accessing databases of faces and retinas, ever watchful for enemies not of the State as we currently understand it, but of the people who own the right to program the machines which watch over us. The State will have become technocratic – fascism by remote control – the dream of evil men for generations will have come to fruition. We have scant few years to arrest the development of these technologies or to rearchitect the social foundations of liberty to survive a situation where combat robots leave the population largely powerless to resist tyranny, whether they have their rifles or not. To develop the technology to defeat the rifle utterly in the field is roughly equivalent to absolute, final, global disarmament of the population.

A cause for concern, I think you will agree.

I am not suggesting that these combat robots will have human intelligence. I am not suggesting they will be effective policemen in the crime solving sense. They will start as remote controlled weapons platforms, then evolve common sense on navigation, then target selection, then tactics and strategy. What can be automated successfully will be automated, and the rest will be left to men in bunkers viewing screens where blood is rendered in black or blue, not red, and the faces of the fallen are fuzzed out as distractions from the real work of identifying and terminating enemies among the living. The dehumanizing of the enemy moves from wetware to software to hardware reducing all moral sentiment on the part of the soldiers which might stay their hands or cause them to question their chain of command. How you see the battlefield dictates your moral response to it, I am sure.

Oppressing the masses is a job you can send a robot to do, or a flock of them. You can hurt people to order fairly easily with machines only a few decades away.

So what do we do about this future of oppression at the hands of robots developed to defeat the improvised weapons of freedom fighters, revolutionaries and insurgents everywhere? What do we do about a future where little guy finally has no chance at all against the State, should the state turn against him and seek to drive him to the wall? What indeed can we do about that situation?

The first thing we can do is work to prevent it.

I want you to get serious about putting aside your political differences about the economy, and to get serious, left and right, about making sure that our children don’t grow up in a world where men they will never see or vote for control the box on the corner that tortures you with an invisible ray any time you get out of line.

I will note that the development of a remote mass torture device contravenes all human and natural law, and the insistence that it will “save lives” is based on a simple misunderstanding: if the people are taking to the streets and screaming for change, and you torture them where they stand to make them stop asking for change, eventually they will turn to real violence and kill the hand that tortures them to make them comply, if they can.

Lines are being crossed here, people. Technologies which stand every chance of enslaving us all are being developed to win the Iraq war, and the Iraq war is typically of armed resistance to government anywhere, at any time. It is disorganized, angry men with rifles and bombs dying for what they believe in, however misguided. If the ability to defeat such groups is developed and placed into the hands of the current incumbent governments and power groups, the same processes that gave rise to a Free revolutionary America will no longer operate, and there will be no more stands to be made against the Empire. Those who stand will be ceaselessly and cheaply cut down by replaceable robot warriors manufactured far from the fray, operated from bunkers, and far away from TV. There will be little or no home front pressure to stop unjust and unnecessary wars because only the blood of the enemy will be shed in armed conflicts. The human cost of war will be borne entirely by the underdog, and therefore the underdogs will have lost their primary means of making the incumbent power groups change course. And, let me tell you, we are all potentially that underdog.

This must be stopped before it can be started, because once the politicians have these tools, they will not give them up, any more than they were willing to give up nuclear weapons once they had been tested. We must not let them get this stuff into the field, because once it has been proven to work in putting down rebellions, the terminal check on the power of centralized governments will be gone. This is the big one.

Get moving. It’s time to get moving. Get real, understand the issues, understand the technology, get worried about the right things, and get organized.

Let me remind you: billions of dollars of R&D money are going into robots designed to win the war that the Founding Fathers imagined the population might one day have to fight against the government, and the clock is ticking on the complete destabilization of the balance of power between the American people and their government.

Once these technologies are developed and field tested, the Constitution is effectively dead until such time as the balance of power between people with their backs to the wall, and the American State, is restored.

Get moving. The time to act is now. We must find solidity and unity in our stand on human rights, on civil liberties as the heart of the American state.