Years ago, the ABC (Atomic, Bacterial, Chemical) warriors were a staple of 2000AD, anthropomorphised traits within robot bodies fighting a strange alternative to the Soviet Union, before Terminator ever came along. Not that these robots will be introduced into the fray by any government soon: instead, we have an increasing number of drones that can be used to recon, assess, communicate and destroy from a distance:
These UAVs are just the tip of the drone iceberg. Besides specialized
anti-munitions drones, defense turrets, and surveillance drones already
in use, the U.S. military is developing rolling ground vehicles, water
surface vehicles, and remote bombers that could all see action in the
next few years. There are several competing models for each category,
but the Crusher (ground), X-45 (air), and USV (water) are advanced
enough to have videos available on the web. Each of these drones would
be piloted by controllers many miles away from the field (eventually
even from the other side of the world).
As war becomes an increasingly automated and electronic landscape, we could again see a widening tachnological gap between the sophisticates and the primitives.
The weakness within the battlefield is not at the level of the drone but at the level of the controller, where it is calculated that the human brain has reached its bandwidth limit.
Dr Small, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, splits humankind into two categories: digital natives (children who were born post-Apple Macintosh) and digital immigrants (oldsters who still suspect that their computers harbour incubi). Youngsters are better at snap decisions and juggling lots of sensory input; their seniors are great at reading facial expressions. “The typical immigrant’s brain was trained in completely different ways of socialising and learning, taking things step by step and addressing one task at a time,” he says.
In post-Mac children, searching the internet “appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading”. But even Small admits that this comes at a price: these digital natives devote markedly less time to old-fashioned fundamental social skills such as talking face-to-face with the person next door.
Professor Jeste, meanwhile, thinks that the difference in how we cope with info-deluge may come down to genes, luck and experience: “Some people may be overwhelmed by stress while others who are more resilient would respond to it with growth and development,” he says.
As social skills, wisdom and compassion are less developed than attentiveness, we are said to be more focused, less wise. Yet the Times article forgets that it is not how much information we look at, but the way we look at it. Information overload is merely a business opportunity for the digerati. We need to develop better filters, better AI. If not, then those less wise often go to war, with their guns and their drones and their bombs.