By Ralph Forbes
On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex. Now technology and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned war against Iran are turning the weapon-makers’ dream into our nightmare.
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2001 directed the United States armed forces to create an unmanned combat vehicle force that will be one-third of all vehicles. Since then, the military has upgraded to unmanned launch systems that can fire missiles by remote control and has produced unmanned drones, as well as small, unmanned ground vehicles, like driverless light tanks, that weigh 9.3 tons and carry powerful weapons.
The future is now with robots pursuing targets and demanding coded access numbers. If the target can’t give the correct code instantly, the robot might sound an alarm or fire a deadly weapon.
The military-industrial-complex war criminals are even experimenting with brain-machine interface technologies. They are fine-tuning programs that give remote pilots instantaneous control of drones to shoot missiles with their thoughts alone.
Today Israeli and U.S. naval ships can operate on their own with humans around only to monitor routes. A new automated weapons system is “on duty” in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. This robot sentry has integrated systems for surveillance, tracking, firing and voice-recognition. It even has an “automatic” mode to fire without a human command.
Then there is the autonomous terminator—needing no human “interference”—that is the unholy grail for these “neocon” bombmakers: a robotic killing device that can make up its own mind who to attack and when.
Even more troubling is the fact that neuroscientists working for the military have been experimenting with “whole mind emulation”—the uploading of a mind from a brain into a computer.
Dr. Jonathan D. Moreno, author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century, has raised bleak questions about hybrid terminators, whose computers are based on whole mind emulation. Would these devices even need human minders, or will these inhuman hunter-killers—created in the image of their war schemers—inherit the Earth?
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Ralph Forbes is a freelance writer based in Arkansas. He is also a member of AFP’s Southern Bureau. Contact him at [email protected]
