Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

Strickland knew that his combination of youth and poise would be an advantage here. Disruptive technology was like that. Now, at twenty-two, he was leading a team that was about to revolutionize visual image processing. Although he wasn’t the driving force behind the innovations, he did know how to spot and recruit talent to his work teams. If history was any guide, that was the primary skill necessary for success in Silicon Valley. Being able to spot a good idea and knowing who could make it work. Removing obstacles and inspiring others, that was the biggest part of innovation.

Strickland glanced at his watch—then realized he wasn’t wearing one. That he was, in fact, “philosophically opposed to wearing watches.” What a poser he was. Lately he had begun to annoy even himself.

An ant colony exhibited nothing like a human’s sophistication, of course, but there definitely was a specialized intelligence. One that could plan and deliberately act. She’d seen that with other ant species like Atta laevigata, whose gigantic colonies excavated in Brazil extended twenty feet belowground with populations in the millions. These were cities able to regulate oxygen flow and temperature, able to farm fungi, dispose of waste.

With a few clicks he flipped it to show her a map of the D.C. metro area with clusters of thousands of red dots on it. “Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.”

“I can’t remember if I was as self-important as you when I was your age, but I do know I never learned anything by talking.” “Well, that’s one of the benefits of social media. We can automate the talking.”

“Kill-decision drones are a thorny issue, Master Sergeant. For the foreseeable future we’re keeping a human in the loop.”

“We both know the days of manned combat aircraft are numbered. Autonomous drones will be cheaper, more maneuverable, and expendable. And remotely piloted drones will be useless against a sophisticated adversary like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—they’ll just jam our link signal. That means we need to integrate autonomous drones into our

Basically you fucked everything up.” Foxy looked up from the clipboard. “But on a personal note: That was seriously metal.”

But behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is the implicit threat of rebellion. That’s the bargain that holds a free society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.”

“I didn’t say violence—I said the implicit threat of force. Think about it: Democracy only arose when the ability to employ force was decentralized. If you go back to the Middle Ages, the state-of-the-art weapon system was the armored knight. He cost a fortune to train, feed, and equip. But a mounted armored knight could overpower almost any number of peasants on a battlefield. And the distribution of political power in medieval society reflected that; authority was vested in a tiny minority, and the people had no choice but to obey. “Then, with the advent of gunpowder, that all changed. Suddenly you didn’t need a highly trained specialist warrior to win on the battlefield. All you needed was a warm body who could fire a gun. Anything they could aim at, they could kill. And at that point the edge in warfare went not to highly trained warriors, but to the side that could field the most people. At which point we saw the rise of nation-states—and nationalism as a concept—as the logistical requirement for fielding an ever-larger conscripted army. But this changed the political dynamic. The nobles could no longer ignore the demands of their subjects. Those subjects now had the power to kill them or refuse to fight in their wars, and so kings began to cede more political authority to representative bodies of the people—parliaments, and so on.”

“The conference presentation was on ‘brain-jacking.’ They insert the transmitter directly into the insect’s brain—adding it at the larval stage so the insect grows around it. They leverage an existing nervous system to make a remote-controlled minidrone out of a living thing. All you do is activate the neurons that handle flying, turning, crawling, whatever, and the bug’s own nervous system handles the rest. We all thought the guy was sick. Apparently he found a receptive audience in the military.”

I don’t know where you found this thing, but whoever designed it should seriously consider anger management counseling.”

“About autonomous killing machines. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but if machines based on insect intelligence are widely used in warfare, it could remove evolutionary safeguards that have been in place for millions of years. Among the creatures on earth only certain species of ants engage in unrestrained slaughter.” “What about the Holocaust? Or Hiroshima?” “But that came to an end. People didn’t continue the killing. And they didn’t kill everyone who surrendered. Mammals aren’t predisposed to murdering their own species; they engage in a primordial fight-flight-posturing-or-submission process that naturally inhibits killing. But replacing that with an insect paradigm: That means killing without exception. It could begin a self-destructive pattern that circumvents millions of years of evolution—in particular the safeguard that prevents humans from engaging in unlimited intraspecies slaughter.”

Everything the public sees is managed. If there’s a valuable brand to protect—whether it’s a person or a dish soap—these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean . . . who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit’s real?”

There along the far wall was his favorite piece of art—a slab of cut blue-green glass six feet wide, four feet tall, and one inch thick on a three-foot-tall granite pedestal. Projected into the heart of the glass by an ingenious arrangement of blue, white, and red lasers and spinning mirrors was a map of the world, onto which was projected the current “mood” of every continent as derived from word forms flowing through the public Internet—data from Web search queries, blogs, social media entries, Wikipedia edits, news articles, and on and on. Tag clouds of the ten most common words and phrases flowing through the veins of the Net filled the boundaries of each continent. Positive words such as hope and great were depicted in blue, neutral words in white, and negative words in red.