Boom, Boom, Bang… Again and Again and Again

    

There’s so much news about weapons, civilian shootings and military ultra-violence. Is the 21st century reflective of the transition from the information age to the era of total weaponization? Has social media simply evolved into a “death of a thousand cuts,” repositioning the use of money and power into sub-rosa nation and society killers? Are hacking, ransomware, fomenters of super-destructive conspiracy theories the new tools of the unscrupulous governments and political parties? Are these amoral perpetrators using our constitutional guarantees to undermine and subvert our constitutional democracy? First Amendment free speech? Second Amendment gun rights?

Even we are using the constitution to subvert ourselves. We really did not have a profoundly distorted view of unregulated personal guns – one that completely ignored the plain “well regulated militia” language of the Second Amendment – until the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Heller vs District of Columbia in 2008. Even with the latest mass shooting (the sixth this year alone) in San Jose on May 26th, Texas continues to believe that allowing anyone and everyone to carry concealed weapons is a good thing: “Supporters of the new rules [statute], often known as ‘constitutional carry’, say they would allow Texans to better defend themselves in public and abolish unnecessary limits on the constitutional right to bear arms.

“‘This is a simple restoration of Texans' constitutional right under the Second Amendment, a right of the people to keep and bear arms,’ state Senator Charles Schwertner, a Republican, said on Monday, the Texas Tribune reports... Critics say the bill puts lives at risk. Beverly Powell, a Democratic senator, raised safety concerns from some law enforcement groups that opposed the bill… ‘If I sit down at a restaurant with a gentleman or a woman who has a holster on their side and a gun in it, I want to know that person is well-trained in the use of that gun,’ she said.” BBC.com, May 25th. 

All predicated on the National Rifle Association’s mantra that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun.” Notwithstanding the very real statistic that for every thirty civilian gun homicides in the United States, on average only one meets the definition of “justifiable.” Without background checks and permits, how do you know that a gun carrying individual is a “good guy.” And if a “good guy” loses his/her temper? Or simply becomes a “bad guy” for mental health reasons?

This is hardly an anomaly. Indeed, according to the National Rifle Association, Texas will join the ranks of twenty other states to have some form of permitless concealed carry. Guns. Weapons. Individual and national. National? Oh yeah! We used to think that “mutually assured destruction” would prevent all-out nuclear war. We’re not so sure anymore. And we have so many explosive realities on earth that risks from weapons, old and new, are simply multiplying.

Conflicts. Civil wars. Brinksmanship. Gaza. Myanmar. Syria. Yemen. Somalia. Hong Kong. What is particularly threatening is the increasing ability to take soldiers, sailors and airmen and women out of harm’s way by using either remotely controlled or autonomous weapon systems. You can inflict death and destruction of all forms of targets – civilian, military, strategic – without an “at risk on a battlefield” individual decision. Does that make starting a war that much easier?

For quite some time, cruise missiles have been able to be programmed to have a list of prioritized “targets” so that if for some reason the primary target cannot be found, a deployed missile will not be wasted. We are witnessing US Airforce drone pilots in Arizona, controlling Hellfire missiles thousands of miles away, experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder as their targets are vaporized. We spend 41% of the entire global military budget all by ourselves. The arms race is accelerating. Russia, China and the United States are now developing, building and testing the next generation of weapon systems: autonomous weapons, not under any individual’s decision-making control, being sent out to battle with the ability to decide who lives… and who dies.

“One of the Pentagon’s primary jobs is anticipating what the wars of the future will look like so that it can allocate the resources necessary to make sure the U.S. has the edge in those battles. When people in the defense industry talk about the tools of future war, they usually mention applications of AI, autonomous weaponry, and a very different role for warm-blooded human beings during battle.

“These technologies are in their early stages of maturity; defense forces don’t yet understand the best ways to deploy them in battle. Military leaders in other wealthy countries, including China and Russia, are also talking about such matters, though we don’t know where they’re placing their bets.

“For a number of reasons—some old, some new—the U.S. could easily get pulled into a race to develop and use autonomous weapons before it understands how to use them predictably, effectively, and ethically.

“‘There’s an AI arms race where I’m worried about your development of this technology and you’re worried about my development of this technology, and neither of us communicates that we’re aware of the limitations,’ said Chris Meserole, director of research and policy for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution. He spoke during a Defense One/Nextgov panel discussion on AI ethics and policy.

“‘It turns into this self-fulfilling prophecy . . . you enter this spiral where each one assumes the other has the advantage,’ Meserol explained. ‘You can end up in a situation where you’re already fighting, when neither party originally wanted to.’” Mark Sullivan for the May 27th FastCompany.com. Is this nature’s way of supplementing pandemics with yet another way to address Malthusian overpopulation? Are human beings programmed to kill each other even more when there are simply too many people on the planet. Are there moral alternatives that we need to prioritize? One would hope so, but there is little evidence that mankind is taking those alternatives into serious consideration.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while experiencing death and destruction on a personal basis is horrific, given our lackadaisical commitment to earth’s sustainability, we are pushing nature to accelerate mass annihilation as its increasingly necessary tool.