Call of Drones: Gamifying Recruitment for Waging War
Gamifying Recruitment for Waging War
Call of Duty Drones
As reported, the military is going to release a video game that reports to the Air Force so it can target the best players for recruitment. I can't wait for our military's most lethal murder machines to be staffed by kids straight out of high school, raised on Call of Duty, and who still don't know how to do their own laundry.
This gamified recruitment strategy itself seems inspired by the film The Last Starfighter and its derivatives, Ernst Clive's book Armada and the TV Show Future Man. I know that science fiction has long been used as inspiration for technology, but the idea that a computer game is to really be used to recruit soldiers just seems like a really, really bad idea. The goal isn't to protect humanity from extraterrestial invaders, it's to remote control military robots to kill other human beings.
Doubtless, the data from the game will be compared with the targets' big data profiles via the weaponized Facebook-Google-Five Eyes dystopian techno-feudal surveillance enslavement state to enable the best selection, but that actually makes the principle of the thing worse, not better. Now they can find the asocial psychopaths and purposely recruit them, put them behind a joystick steering a massacre machine and turn them loose.
This is another giant leap further down in the dystopian abyss that is the postmodern era. Computer geeks competing for the right to become real-world killers for a paycheck is a terrifying concept. I have played my share of online MMORPGS and I don't want the best players in the world piloting real-life murder machines. The very idea of it is beyond blood-curdling. It is manifest madness.
We have gone from the technology of Star Trek serving as inspiration for technology of the future - Beam me up, Scotty! - to it being in practically everybody's pocket every day. Now we face a future where it isn't the technology that is supposed to help us being put into production, but the technology meant to subjugate, control and eliminate us taken straight out of dystopian science fiction films.
This in turn makes me think we are just a few years away and less than one step removed from the Black Mirror episodes "Men Against Fire" (S03E05) , "Hated in the Nation" (S03E06) and "Metalhead" (S04E05) all rolled into one. In "Men Against Fire", soldiers are programmed into seeing humans as monsters. In "Hated in the Nation" robotic bees are used to execute "hated" targets and in "Metalhead" robotic "dogs" track and kill humans. Hello, Spot!
But there is a more apt comparison. Children piloting robots is eerily reminiscent of the book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, wherein the most talented children in the world are recruited by the military and used to eradicate an alien species. In the book, every battle of the war including the final eradication takes place in computer simulated "training sessions" which are actually military drone missions being executed in real time.
The very real danger here is that in five or ten years, teenagers will be piloting Boston Dynamic robots armed with rocket launchers and 50mm machine guns in a live-stream VR overlay. Enemy targets in the purview of terminator-style murder machines will be overlaid with graphics rendering them into monsters, aliens, robots, or any other desired image, enabling children to kill people while they believe they are playing a game.
Once recruitment for waging war has been gamified, why not warfare itself? Of course, this scenario may never happen, or it may be happening already. Who knows at this point? It isn't like there is any real accountability left in government. What we can surmise however, is that the best gamers will be recruited first to pilot the robots, then to train the AI how to do so, then for the AI to practice against humans until it can't be defeated. It is Big Blue on the battlefield and humanity is the opponent.
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It concerns me that so many millennials derive their moral compass from hollywood.
I totally agree. Completely amoral pleasure-seeking with no consequences, unreal depictions of women, disparaging depictions of family and the demonization of men has helped shape a generation that, according to all research, is the unhappiest cohort of people to ever grace the planet.
Western warfare has been a game, since the transformation of barbaric fiefdoms into Christendom. Other than the Reconquista of Iberia, European wars were between Christians, ie among monocultural sociopolitical entities. After Carolus Magnus' genocidal crusade against the pagan Saxons, no real external, alien sociocultural force threatened Christendom, until the rise of the Osman house in the East. Perpetual internecine warfare among Christians seems to have reduced the concept of war into a ritualized game for the aristocracy in the Western mind. Thus, the fascinating, perplexing, and comical Western concepts of jus ad bellum and jus in bello in discussing "proper" conduct in war - a sociocultural conflict between irreconcilable societies who can not communicate effectively to reach a peaceful consensus.
The Western mind has perceived war as a game, since the Middle Ages. Even within the 20th century, the fools in government prattle about "war on poverty," "war of drugs," and quote Sun Tzu when discussing mercantile dealings. In a sense, Christian sensibility and the ludicrous notion of just war theories have reduced war into a game, resulting in a polity more willing to kill than not - a paradox or irony of sorts. War is the extermination of the opposing idea, using any available force, even nuclear or biological annihilation. The theory of "just war" is claptrap nonsense that results in more hazard than benefit to the human race.
An answer like yours, makes me follow you.
Another insightful comment, everything today is "war-gamed" until optimal vectors for compliance is reached. At the time of the American Revolution the gamification of war by the aristocracy, as you note, was complete. The madness of the "rulers" was nowhere more apparent than in the line attacks of musket warfare, where lines of men stood at point blank range and shot at each other:
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
Relevance: Skynet in it's Larval stage
Our Purpose
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
Relevance: Skynet in it's Larval stage
Our Purpose
I agree with everything you shared in this post. There is a solution. Get with our committee's of safety and learn what the law actually is. Then we can regain accountability from our governments. If just two percent of Americans did this the corruption wouldn't have a chance.
You can find a committee of safety on the below website.
https://www.nationallibertyalliance.org/
Accountability is key, getting it back is an uphill battle. I wrote a lengthy series on doing just that via ballot initiatives starting here. It is a long read, but it might interest you. Thanks for the link, will check it out.
This is what happens when fictions can be protected Principals. Lot's of cartoons are running the world.
The governments are the cartoons, drawn by the careful hands of the money masters.
They already have drones that are remote controlled from halfway across the world and used for air-strikes. From the 'pilot' perspective, it's a lot like playing a video game.
Thanks to @paradigmprospect, this post was resteemed and highlighted in today's edition of The Daily Sneak.
Thank you for your efforts to create quality content!
True that. The reason AI is the logical next step is people can disobey. That and even drone pilots get traumatized when they reflect on what they are doing. News story on drone pilot ptsd
War is fought for the masters. Nations are built for the masters. Everything is done for the masters.
"If my sons did not want wars, there would be none." -Gutle Schnaper Rothschild
Are Rothschilds so powerful?
I remember all of those episodes! You know what concerns me even more than the possibility of people being tricked into warfare with augmented reality is the idea of AI making the decision on who lives and who dies. I think they've already tested it out on the drones if I remember correctly. Even if we could convince corporations in general to implement Asimov's three laws of robotics it's highly doubtful that any meaningful parties like the defense department or other foreign militaries would adopt it. Same thing as gun control really, impossible.