Nor am I talking about a nuclear bomb capable of annihilating a whole city, but one that can turn to smoke perhaps a few building blocks and turn to uninhabitable a great number more. (Note: A reader raised the objection that there is a limit to how small nuclear weapons can become due to the well-known critical mass for radioactive material to start nuclear chain reactions, and the rest of the appurtenances that a nuclear bomb must have in order to function as a controlled bomb. I don’t dispute all this. Although we can’t predict the technology of the future on the basis of what we know at present, let us suppose that planting a nuclear bomb in a womb will indeed remain an impossibility forever. But I don’t mean to narrow the scope of what I am talking about to nuclear weapons. It could be biological weapons: a “bomb” that spreads deadly viruses, without even a need for an explosion, but working merely by the actroid’s coughing or sneezing. So when you read about “nuclear weapons” in this article, please interpret that as a generic term for “weapons of mass destruction”.) Let’s see... I suspect you don’t really object that this is a plausible scenario. What you really believe (or maybe just hope) is that it will be us, our side, our army that will acquire such marvelous weapons. The enemy won’t have them, and so we, with our superior technology, will emerge victorious and live happily ever after, having crushed the barbarians. Yey! It is typically Americans who display this attitude regarding hi-tech weapons. (If you are an American and are reading this, what I wrote doesn’t imply that you necessarily display this attitude; note the word “typically”, please.) The American culture has an eerily childish approach toward weapons, and also some outlandish (but also child-like) disregard for human life. (Once again, you might be an intelligent, mature American, respecting life deeply; it is your average compatriot I am talking about.) Here is what an American journalist wrote in Washington Post, on May 6, 2007: “So where does the air vehicle called the Predator [i.e., a flying robot] fit? It is unmanned, and impressive. In 2002, in Yemen, one run by the CIA came up behind an SUV full of al-Qaeda leaders and successfully fired a Hellfire missile, leaving a large smoking crater where the vehicle used to be.” Yes, just as you read it: a number of human beings were turned to smoke and smithereens, and this pathetic journalist, whoever he is, speaking with the mentality of a 10-year-old who blows up his toy soldiers, reports in cold blood how people were turned to ashes by his favorite (“impressive”, yeah) military toys. Of course, for overgrown pre-teens like him, the SUV was not full of human beings, but of “al-Qaeda leaders” (as if he knew their ranks), of terrorists, sub-humans who aren’t worthy of living, who don’t have mothers to be devastated by their loss. Thinking of the enemy as subhuman scum to be obliterated without second thoughts was a typical attitude displayed by Nazis against Jews (and others) in World War II. (The full article, of which I used to supply the link here, but removed it later so as not to reveal anymore the name of its author, explains how soldiers become sentimentally attached to their robots, extensions of their teenage-time toys, obviously ascribing to them a higher value than human life.) If this attitude were marginal among Americans, if the above story were a fluke, I wouldn’t worry at all. Any moron can say anything they like in a free society, and even have their imbecilic thoughts appear in print. The problem from my point of view is that I’ve seen the above attitude again and again in the years that I lived in the U.S.A. Once, the janitor of the building where I used to do my research, having just learned some sad news about American soldiers killed in Iraq, wondered in a discussion with me: “Why don’t we just nuke ’em all? Just turn the damn desert into glass and be done with those ___” (I don’t remember what adjective he used). You might think the janitor wasn’t very sophisticated in his approach toward war or human lives. But a few days later I was reading another article on a web site, of which unfortunately I didn’t save the address, that was reporting about a similar issue as the one above: how to use robots to enter caves (it was known that the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, was hiding in caves at the Afghanistan–Pakistan border back then), search for terrorists, and blast the place, terrorists, robot, and all; “to smoke them out of their holes”, as that pinnacle of wisdom, the American president G. W. Bush, said immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Note: For years I was hesitating posting the pictures that follow, finding them too disturbing. But now (2009), several years after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, and with spirits having cooled down, I thought these pictures should see the light of day on a page that gets several hits by American readers, because back then (in 2003) such images never made it through the sift of “kosher” photos, thought by the U.S. media to be inappropriate for the oh-so-sensitive American public. So, here they are; this is what — among others — gave me a good kick and sent me out of the “land of the free” (pre-teens and other juvenile thinkers), trying to avoid feeling like an accomplice to their atrocities:

Iraqi child, Ali Ismali Abbas, 12 yr old,

April 2003, immediately after the U.S.-led

invasion of Iraq. He wants his arms back. Mr. Al Shawamra is holding in his

hands w hat was left of his family

after a U.S. aircraft bombed his home. Iraqi children after a car- bomb attack to their

school , April 2007. Though the perpetrators

were Muslim militants, this would not have

happened without the U.S. invasion. These images do not give even the slightest idea of the mayhem and carnage that “intelligent” and “impressive” weapons of soul destruction inflicted on the people of Iraq. Mr. American journalist, yes you, the impressed one, do such pictures make no impression at all to you? Are only smoking craters of terrorists worthy of your admiration?

Or did you think that your war leaves behind only dead bodies of “al-Qaeda leaders” and other terrorists? So, back to our subject: how nice it would be to have “actroids” pregnant with nuclear or biological bombs, right? Perhaps “nuctroids”, how about that? Of course, only we would know they are actually nuctroids. To the terrorists they would pass for normal people. How immature must a person be to believe something like that! Think of nuclear weapons. When they first appeared on the scene, in the second half of the 20th century, originally only five nations possessed them: the U.S.A., the U.K., France, the Soviet Union, and China (the victors of WWII). Gradually, more countries entered the nuclear club, some of them openly (India, Pakistan), others secretly (Israel). Now every pariah state can have their nuclear toys, or dream of acquiring them. At the time the present was written, there was a strong fear in the international community that Pakistan’s American-supported dictator would be overthrown by extremist Islamists, and the nuclear bombs that Pakistan possesses would fall into the hands of terrorists. It is no secret that Iran, an avowed enemy of the U.S.A., is planning to build its own nuclear weapons. Turkey, now an ally of the U.S., is planning to build its own “energy-only” nuclear factories; but after one or two decades Turkey might turn into a hub for radical Islamism due to its gradually changing demographics, and so in the future we might have another Iran-like nuclear-power wannabe in the same region. So by what stretch of the imagination and crooked logic will it become impossible for pariah states, or even individuals, to possess and command “nuctroids” in the foreseeable future? Technology spreads. It’s not something that can be confined within national borders. Especially now, when we talk about globalization, we must understand that knowledge “goes global” too, and this includes the specialized knowledge needed to build an extra-small weapon of mass destruction, or a human-like deadly robot. So how does working toward innocent projects such as the automation of Bongard problems tie in into all this? As I explained earlier, it’s not just the automation of Bongard problems that’s involved. It’s about the automation of cognition. Here is what the program I developed, Phaeaco, would in principle be able to do: The above animated image starts with a picture of some city blocks, taken from Google Earth. It then shows the result of successive application of various “filters” that do rudimentary “image processing” on it. Then the image is processed further in ways specific to Phaeaco (which does that assuming its input is a Bongard problem), until we finally arrive at an image in which the city blocks have been identified, their locations are known. Now imagine this is your city — your home perhaps is in one of those blocks — and that a drone is flying over it, identifying the blocks as the above image suggests, but very quickly, in real time. The drone could be armed with bombs, and could be “intelligent” enough to select a targeted city block and direct a bomb to it — “intelligent”, but morally blind. Anyone who works toward making machines intelligent, and especially wanting machines to “come alive”, must understand the grave ethical issues involved in such an endeavor. Consider the following email message sent by a student at Indiana University (IU, the academic institution where I did my Ph.D.) in 2008 (my emphasis): Hello everyone, The IU Robotics Club is having its first meeting this Thursday,

January 17th. We are a group of undergraduates and graduates hailing

from many fields with a common interest in all robotics, automata,

synthetic life and artificial intelligence. We encourage people to make

stuff come alive, whatever they decide that means. Does anyone at IU realize the ethical issues that these kids are toying with? Is it really more important to be concerned with cloning and stem cell research? Does it not matter at all that these kids, or maybe their children, might be turned to a loose collection of quantum particles some time in the not-so-remote future by the fruits of their own toy-making? Or is it that what causes the indifference is the remoteness of the future, whereas other ethical issues in science are present here-and-now? But don’t the seriousness of the nuctroid threat and its logical inevitability make any impression on anyone?