Escape Velocity (19 page)

"Big Bicycle Bird/'"Water Wheel Bird," and, in foreground, "Beach Chair Bird," in Birdland. Photo: Rusty Reniers

"Water Wheel Bird." © } 99S Brett Goldstone "Beach Chair Bird." © 1995 Brett Goldstone

with hands clad in motion-sensing virtual reality gloves, the robot's manipulators move in tandem.

The operator of SRL's air launcher vv^ears a lightw^eight armature that rests on his shoulders; its visor is equipped w^ith two Hi8 video camera viewfinders that fit into the operator's eyes with eyecups, immersing the operator in a stereoscopic projection of what two video cameras mounted on the barrel "see." The headmount is connected to a servo system that enables the barrel of the launcher to follow the wearer's head movements.

"The machine fires a beer can filled with concrete, about eighty grams of high explosive, and a contact detonator at about 550 feet per second," says Pauline. "You've got an ergonomic controller that allows you to push these buttons that you feel with the sweep of your thumb, locking the gun down once you've acquired the target. There's a crosshair at your focal point about four feet away and when you line up the target with that, you fire, and it just obliterates it."

Prolonged submersion in the air launcher's headmounted viewing system gives rise to the experience known as "telepresence," the out-of-body sensation that occurs when the gap between sense perception and simulated reality (or, in this case, live video images of the actual surroundings) is sufficiently narrow that the user is convinced that he is t/2ere-immersed in the virtual world (or one with the remote-controlled device). "The depth perception is incredible, and once you get all the adjustments right, you just sink into it," says Pauline. "You start to imagine your body in different ways, just like you do when you're in an isolation tank; [the technology] becomes transparent because of the comfort level, which is the key feature in any of these input devices. Once you achieve transparency, interesting things start to occur. It doesn't take much, because the mind is . . . actively trying to meld with anything. . . . The virtual reality display couples the operator more closely to the machine. It feels like your head is mounted on the machine, like you're riding on top of the missile."

In SRL performances, the gun-mounted video cameras project the view to a kill seen by the goggle-equipped teleoperator onto a large screen positioned near the audience. The green phosphor imagery relayed by cameras mounted on smart bombs during the Gulf War comes immediately to mind. Watching "the pornography of destruction through [SRL's] eyes" (Pauline's words), spectators are reminded of their wartime role as living

room voyeurs, and of the numbing unreality of history's first "virtual" war-a made-for-TV miniseries introduced by punchy logos and pumped-up, martial music reminiscent of trailers for Hollyw^ood blockbusters.

"I'm going to use the air launcher for lectures," says Pauline. "I'll show how^ it could be used to destroy the federal infrastructure in the same w^ay that they talked about destroying the infrastructure of Iraq." A tight, mirthless smile flits across his face. "It's a prank."

If so, it's a prank in the Molotov cocktail sense of the word, a gag designed to blow up in society's face. In Pauline's hands, rail guns, Swarmers, low-frequency generators, and teleoperated air launchers are actors in a dark farce that has grim fun wdth the notion of a bloodless "smart" war sold to the American public by a dukes-up president and a cheerleading media.

The Persian Gulf War was portrayed, at the time, as an unmitigated success brought about by high-tech weaponry. "From a technological point of view," writes John A. Barry, "the war was a testing ground for 'smart weapons' such as the Patriot and Tomahawk missiles that had never been tested in battle and were in danger of losing funding from the Pentagon. Their apparent success under actual fighting conditions breathed new life into them and prompted commentators to note that this war was also the first 'technology war.' "•"*

Unfortunately, the official reading was later exposed as a Nintendo fantasy. The bulk of the damage done to the enemy was inflicted not by "Scud-busting" Patriots but by disappointingly "dumb" bombs. John R. MacArthur, who calls the smart/dumb discrepancy "one of the biggest untold stories of the Gulf war," reports that after the war

the Air Force announced that laser- and radar-guided bombs and missiles made up just 7 percent of all U.S. explosives dropped on Iraq and Kuwait. The other 93 percent were conventional "dumb" bombs, dropped primarily by high-flying B-52s from the Vietnam era.'^

Nonetheless, as MacArthur noted on WNYC radio's May 16,1993, broadcast of On the Media program, "If you watched the coverage-such as it was-you got the impression that every bomb was a smart bomb hitting a

machine." TV's portrayal of the Gulf War as a video game in which Patriots knocked Scuds out of the air and laser-guided missiles blew up the built environment recalls the World War II propaganda cartoon Victory through Air Power. Created for the Department of Defense by Disney, the animated short was intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of large-scale strategic bombing. The critic James Agee was disturbed by its portrayal of warfare as a bloodless struggle between anthropomorphized weaponry:

I noticed, uneasily, that there were no suffering and dying enemy civilians under all those proud promises of bombs; no civilians at all, in fact. . . . this victory-in-a-vacuum ... is so morally simple a matter . . . of machine-eat-machine.'^

A little less than half a century later, the fantasy of trading in the grimy, disorderly bedlam of war for a "morally simple" clash between good and evil automata bubbled up again, in official fictions about a "clean" war. Unfortunately, the Gulf War was anything but clean when viewed up close: The deadly rain of bombs that buried fleeing Iraqi troops on the Basra road, shortly before the cease-fire, left a thirty-mile column of crumpled vehicles and flame-broiled corpses.

The argument is sometimes made that a war fought entirely by machines would save human lives. When I asked MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks if he was troubled by the possibility, however remote, that his machines might end up on a robotic battlefield, he voiced this very opinion. "A battle fought entirely by robots would be sort of nice, wouldn't it?" said Brooks. "It seems a much more humane way of settling differences. There's certainly interest in any way of conducting battle that limits casualties on our side, which is a very humanistic point of view from the perspective of the brass."

The argument seems reasonable, although the word "humane" strikes a sour note in such an inhuman context. Nonetheless, one might respond: Wouldn't diplomatic negotiation be more humane still? And given that war, the ultimate madness, springs from the collapse of reason, isn't there an inherent absurdity in the notion of a "safe," "rationalized" war? Shouldn't nations whose technological sophistication is sufficient to produce smart, autonomous, robot weapons be intellectually capable of reasoning their way out of armed conflict?

Nonetheless, the pernicious fiction of a smart war exhibits a curious half-life. It lives on in articles such as the enthusiastic feature on the automated battlefield of the future that appeared in Compute magazine a few months after the war ended. One photo depicted the Fire Ant, a teleope-rated "smart assassin" under development at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The squat buggy is guided to its post, parked and armed by a remote human operator viewing the surroundings via a small TV camera perched on top of the Ant. When its sensors detect an enemy vehicle, the robotic vehicle locks onto the target and fires a six-inch armor-piercing slug at sixty-six hundred feet per second. A second photo showed the nasty results of the Fire Ant's sting: an M-47 tank consumed by flames. "Each of the robots shown in the accompanying photographs exists ... to keep people out of harm's way," assured the author.'^ Automation makes the world safe for robo-war.

Dreams of hunter-killer machines and robo-soldiers in armored exoskeletons are not new. In 1919, the trailblazing inventor Nikola Tesla envisioned a Jules Verne war fought by intelligent machines called "tel-automata." Writing in Science and Invention, the pulp editor Hugo Gerns-back celebrated Tesla's "veritable war of science" where "machines only will meet in mortal combat."'^ A half-century later. General William C. Westmoreland, then chief of staff of the U.S. Army, predicted, "On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data-links, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation and automated fire control. I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of. . . lethal firepower."'^ In 1971, a San Francisco Chronicle writer told a cautionary tale about a hardwired war world, "a manless, foolproof, giant lethal pinball machine out of which no living thing could ever escape." The author warned that "the entire world, if wired right, could become a great maze of circuitry and weaponry, a jungle from which those who walk off the straight paths from home to store would be immediately and totally eliminated."^^ The nightmare battlefield of Terminator 2, a rubble-strewn Golgotha stalked by red-eyed, stainless-steel manhunt-ers, seems bloodcurdlingly near.

Before Operation Desert Storm, the PBS science series Nova aired a segment on smart weapons, titled "Killing Machines." It included an

interview with Tom Clancy, an autlior of popular techno-thrillers whose remarks account for the program's spookiest moments. "One of the things about smart weapons that people don't think about very much is the psychological factor," said Clancy, with a thin, mechanical smile. "It is one thing to be hunted by a man who has a wife and children and dreams and ideas. It is another thing entirely to be hunted by a machine that doesn't care that you're a living person with dreams and hopes and a sweetheart. It just knows that you're something it wants to kill. That is truly scary."

Scarier still is the realization that Clancy's comments, positioned as fact, sound like science fiction. They bear a disquieting resemblance to the doomy monologue delivered by Kyle Reese, a robot-killing street fighter in The Terminator. "It can't be bargained with," says Reese, of his mechanical adversary. "It can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

As the credits to the Nova episode roll, a nagging question remains: If these things are so scary, why does Clancy smile? Perhaps it is because he, like Pauline, finds death technology terrifying but fascinating. The android gunslinger in Westworld or the homicidal robot in the cult film Hardware fascinate because they are graven images come to life, clockwork contraptions born of human ingenuity. And they terrify for precisely that reason: they are inhuman, ticking things, unconcerned that the petrified creature frozen in the crosshairs of the laser scope is "a living person with dreams and hopes and a sweetheart." Like the eerie Stealth bomber, with its devilfish silhouette, or the locustlike Apache helicopter, predatory machines dredge memories from the collective unconscious-man-eating beasts, angry gods.

Lastly, such devices are erotic, in a necrophilic way. On their matte black, inscrutable surfaces, we inscribe our death fetish, our delicious fear of the unknown. In the Western, Christian tradition, the human subject is affirmed by its boundaries, but it is paradoxically those same boundaries that isolate the island self, separated on all sides by a limitless gulf between it and all that is not it. "We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity," writes Georges Bataille, in Erotism: Death and Sensu-ahty.^^ Thus the duality of death, which promises to return us to that continuity-the womb, where we were at one with the nurturing envelope

that was our cosmos-by way of the tomb, which threatens to snufF the self out forever.

The sex act, in which we risk individual dissolution for the ecstasy of fusion, is similarly ambiguous. The cultural critic Claudia Springer has noted the "deathlike loss of self. . . associated with sexual pleasure," an ambiguity made explicit by the French euphemism for the postorgasmic fainting spells some lovers suffer from: la petite mort ("the little death").^^ In the novels of William Burroughs, this ambiguity mushrooms into an unresolvable conflict that goes to the heart of human sexuality: In The Ticket That Exploded, intercourse is an untenable "arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points."-^^ Or, put more poetically on the following page, "Death is orgasm is rebirth is death in orgasm."^"^

The necrophilic fantasy of surrendering oneself to devouring machines that "can't be reasoned with," like the techno-masochist in "Happiness in Slavery," conceals the ultimate bid for Bataille's "lost continuity": the ritual sacrifice of the integrated, self-reflective consciousness without which Western instrumental reason could not exist. Human sacrifice, argues Bataille, is suffused vsdth a "religious eroticism which is concerned with the fusion of beings v^th a world beyond everyday reality."^^ He who sacrifices "is free, free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself ■^^