Gaza: the world's first AI-powered, robot-enabled genocide
The attack on the Palestinian enclave offers a terrifying glimpse into the future of 21st-century warfare
For most of us, being hounded by robot dogs or chased by killer drones is the stuff of nightmares — or dystopian sci-fi films à la Black Mirror. For Gazans, it’s an everyday reality. Over the past five months, the Palestinian enclave hasn’t just been the site of one of the deadliest and most destructive bombing campaigns in history; it has also been a testing ground, a live laboratory, for the next generation of Israeli and Western high-tech weapons and technology — and a window into the disturbing reality of 21st-century warfare.
Just a few days ago, Haaretz reported that “[i]n an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War”. It’s nothing new for the IDF to use robots and unmanned ground vehicles; however, Gaza has seen a steep increase in the use of these technologies. As the author writes, “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield”.
A prominent example is an ominous-looking dog-shaped walking robot called Vision 60, made by Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, similar to the Boston Dynamics robot dog that we’ve all seen videos of. The company describes its robot dog as “unstoppable” and claims to have already sold it to “more than 25 national security customers”. The dogs deployed in Gaza have also been retrofitted with a drone called the Rooster, which can detach from (and reattach to) the dog’s back, resulting in a robot-drone hybrid.
The drone was jointly developed by the Israeli start-up Robotican and the Directorate of Defence Research & Development, the Israeli equivalent of DARPA in the US. It collaborates with all major Israeli defense companies in developing emerging technologies for use by the military.
These robot dogs are used in Gaza solely for surveillance and intelligence-gathering purposes, meaning that they are not equipped with lethal weaponry. But such a development is just one “add-on” away, of course. Indeed, the US Army has already announced its intention to mount machine guns on the Vision 60 and even give them some AI capabilities, and we can rest assured the Israelis have similar projects underway.
Indeed, the IDF is currently using Gaza as a testing ground for a similar technology: small quadcopter drones, similar to the off-the-shelf commercial drones that have become commonplace in households, but with machine guns mounted underneath.
Unlike traditional Reaper-like military drones that fire missiles from high above the clouds, these drones can fly very low and get very close to the target, even inside buildings. Gaza is the first war in which these remote-controlled drones have been deployed on a large scale against enemy combatants — and civilians.
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