This short video from RoboPhil’s channel on YouTube came up in my YouTube feed today. It’s a brief report about the creation of what Phil describes as the world’s first pedal war robot. It’s about five feet tall, can go at four miles an hour and 44 pounds of payload. It’s been created by the private American company Fountain. At the moment it’s rather like a drone, in that it’s remotely controlled by a human operator through Virtual Reality. RoboPhil is really enthusiastic about this, and says that this technology, although at present confined to the military, will percolate down and be used in other industries and sectors of the economy. He ends by promoting his other site, which gives more information on robots and AI to interested businessmen wishing to use it in their firms.
For many people, the immediate image this brings up is of Arnie as The Terminator. But Marvel Comics got there first. There was a story in one of the British Marvel Comics, I think it was Hulk Weekly, appropriately enough, in which Banner stumbles upon a secret military research base. The base has been creating remotely controlled robot warriors, but their human operators are plagued by feelings of dehumanisation. One of these soldiers reveals these feelings to Banner when he enters the psychiatrist’s office and mistakes Banner for him. Banner is absolutely appalled, but the soldier, despite his mental discomfort, doesn’t feel Banner’s dislike of the project. He believes in it. And so the stage is set for a massive fight between the war robot and its human operator and old Green Skin.
It also reminds me of the 2000 AD strip, ABC Warriors. These are a collection of former war robots who roam the galaxy fighting evil and oppression. They were created to fight a future war against the Volgans, when it had become too hot for human soldiers. The strip first appeared in the late ’70s-early 80s, and still continues today. In recent editions of the story, the Volgan War has erupted because the world has reached peak oil and the west is trying to steal the Volgans’ oil fields. There’s always been a powerful element of satire and social comment in 2000 AD, and the strip’s writer and co-creator, Pat Mill, isn’t afraid of making the odd explicit political comment. In one very early ABC Warrior strip, the Warriors are under the command of human officers who have absolutely no regard for their lives. Told to advance, Hammerstein, the leader, and his team are attacked with corrosive gas. This mortally wounds one of the new recruits. Hammerstein states that he can’t cure the stricken machine, but he can stop the pain. The human officers are connected electronically to the robots so they feel some of what the robots experience. However, the system has a ‘pain barrier’ that ensures that they don’t feel the full pain experienced by dead and dying robots. Instead, they just get a tingle when one of them dies. Hammerstein takes out a combat knife to give the dying robot a merciful, swift death. He goes straight through the pain barrier, killing the officer in charge.
It was a powerful story, informed by the common view of the conduct of the First World War in which British squaddies had their lives and limbs squandered by incompetent, upper class officers. This view of the War, shown in plays like Journey’s End, filmed as Oh What A Lovely War, has been challenged in recent years. The ABC Warriors story nevertheless shows how it still has power to inspire powerful anti-war messages, and that Mills’ own sympathies are very much for ordinary people against the uncaring and exploitative upper classes.
We are now fighting a war in eastern Europe, Ukraine, against Russia, using war robots. At the moment they’re drones, though these have been developed into remotely operated tanks and ships as well as aircraft. This bipedal robot really does sound like something the Hulk fought against in that long-ago strip, and the murmurings about the possibility of developing human level AI raises spectre of the emergence of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator or the ABC Warriors.
As for RoboPhil’s enthusiasm for the potential of these robots to revolutionise industry, I really don’t share it. AI is expected to result in the lay off of millions of workers. There was one prediction that a third of low paid jobs could go in the next twenty years thanks to this technology. It might result in increased profits for the companies, especially as Amazon are looking to lay off 6,000 staff in America and replace them with robots, but for the people who’ve lost their jobs to these machines it will bring nothing but hardship.
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