The Robots Are Coming

“It is well that war is so terrible—or we should grow too fond of it.” — Robert E. Lee, after his victory at Fredericksburg, 1862.

It seems that nearly the first question all futurists must ask, when gazing into their science-fiction crystal balls, is what the nature of warfare will be in the years to come. Is it something humans will rise above, or succumb to? From the subterranean denizens of Wells’s Time Machine to the bridge of the USS Enterprise, popular visions of the future of humanity seem to depend largely on one’s answer to whether and how our fictional descendants will end up wrestling out their inter-tribal conflicts. This theme gains its fuel from our tremendous cultural uncertainty about the influence of technological progress in the military realm over at least the last hundred years. From the early attempts at aerial bombardment of civilians and chemical warfare to Hiroshima...