Sex, Bombs and Burgers (34 page)

They couldn’t be more wrong. While chefs like to consider food creation an art inseparable from human touch, robots are actually perfectly suited to the task. They can’t come up with their own recipes—yet—but they can certainly replicate ones they are programmed with, and do so perfectly, every time. Humans, who are prone to distraction and errors, can’t make the same claim.

The big fast-food chains can’t afford to ignore robotic technology indefinitely because, as several have learned in recent years, the risks of continuing to rely on low-paid, low-motivated workers may prove too great. In 2008 Burger King was hit with
a public relations fiasco when an employee took a bubble bath in one of the restaurant’s large sinks, then posted a video of it on his MySpace page. Similarly, Domino’s faced public outrage in 2009 after a video of employees putting snot into food hit YouTube. Both companies had to backpedal and assure customers that these were isolated incidents and that their food was indeed clean and safe. The damage to their reputations, however, was done.

As more of these incidents surface, and they inevitably will given the ubiquity of social media such as YouTube, the appeal of replacing low-paid labour with robots is only going to increase. That means teenagers and other unskilled labourers will be displaced and have to find a new kind of work. It may be a small price to pay to keep boogers off our pizzas.

When you’re at war, you think about a better life. When you’re at peace, you
think about a more comfortable one.
¹

—NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT THORNTON WILDER,
FROM
THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

For much of modern history, the Middle East has been a fertile land of invention where science and technology flourished. From the seventh century onward, while Europe wallowed in the war, hunger and disease of the Dark Ages, the Middle East enjoyed a golden era, an enlightened renaissance from which a steady stream of life-improving inventions flowed. Water turbines, navigational astrolabes, glass mirrors, clocks, the fountain pen and even an analogue computer that calculated the date were just some of the innovations of the time. While Europeans were busying themselves burning libraries and fighting over who God favoured, Islamic scholars were laying the foundations for many of the world’s modern institutions by opening the first hospitals, pharmacies and universities. They also laid the groundwork for a number of modern sciences, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.

Things have changed dramatically in recent times. The past few decades of political turmoil, war and, in some places, religious fundamentalism have largely crippled the region’s intellectual institutions. An area that was once the envy of the world for its progressive thinking now lags in just about every
intellectual and technological measure. In Iran, the former seat of the once-powerful Persian Empire, literacy rates are well below that of the Western world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the current centres of conflict, barely 40 percent of the population can read. Internet use is well behind the developed world, and where people are actually surfing the web, censorship is rampant. While the blocking of pornographic sites isn’t too surprising in Muslim countries, the definition of “questionable” content also extends to political and free-speech websites and tools. During Iran’s election turmoil in 2009, the popular messaging service Twitter was blocked to prevent details of uprisings from spreading. Spending on science and technology in the region stands at a woeful 17 percent of the global average, ranking not just behind the West, but also behind some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia.
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Technological advances
have
occurred in the Middle East in recent years, but perversely, they’ve been deployed by Western militaries. Since the early nineties, the United States and its allies have used the area as a sort of a laboratory for a vast array of new technologies, testing out their capabilities to see what works, what doesn’t work and what can be improved. The impetus behind all new war technology, the military tells us, is to save lives, but as we’ve already seen, there’s also the important by-product of technological spinoff into the mainstream, which is a key driver of Western economies. The recent conflicts in the Middle East are perhaps the best example to date of this terrible duality of military technology: while new war tools and weapons inflict tremendous pain, suffering and hardship on one group of people, they also create prosperity, convenience and comfort for others.

Another Green Revolution

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 sparked a new wave of Western technological development. The ensuing liberation through Operation Desert Storm was of course motivated by oil interests, but it also provided an opportunity for the American military to field-test new technologies, some of which had been sitting on the shelf from as far back as the Vietnam War.

Smart bombs, or precision-guided munitions, were the natural opposite of dumb bombs which, when dropped from a plane, simply used gravity to find their target. Smart bombs were developed during the Vietnam War and used lasers to find their mark—the target was illuminated by a beam that the bomb homed in on. The new weapons promised two key advantages over their precursors: they could improve the efficiency of bombing missions by decreasing the number of munitions needed, thus saving on costs and maximizing damage, and they could lower so-called “collateral damage,” or the destruction of non-military targets and civilian deaths. American forces used such bombs in small numbers in Vietnam, as did the British military during the Falklands War of 1982, but they proved to be of limited use in poor weather. It wasn’t until the Gulf War that they were improved and deployed on a large scale.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of the coalition forces, set the tone of the war in January 1991 when he dazzled reporters with a videotape of a smart bomb zooming through the doors of an Iraqi bunker to blow up a multi-storey command centre. The early stages of the war were going exactly as expected, Schwarzkopf announced, thanks largely to the incredibly accurate bombs being used. “We probably have a more accurate picture of what’s going on ... than I have
ever had before in the early hours of a battle,” said the veteran general, who began his military service way back in 1956.
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Like radar back in the Second World War, smart bombs were hailed by an impressed media as a “miracle weapon” that pounded the Iraqi military into a sorry state, making the ensuing ground war short and easy. Only 7 percent of the munitions dropped on Iraqi forces, however, were of the “smart” kind; the rest were the traditional variety.

Still, smart bombs had proven their worth and their usage has steadily increased in each subsequent conflict. Fully 90 percent of the bombs brought to Iraq by American forces for the second go-round in 2003 were “smart.”
⁴
The laser guidance used in the weapons, meanwhile, has gone mainstream in recent years, primarily in cars, where it has been incorporated into collision-avoidance systems. Toyota, for one, introduced a laser cruise control system in its 2001 Lexus which, like many of the robot vehicles in the DARPA road races, used beams of light to track other cars ahead of it.

If the videos of smart bombs flying into Iraqi targets in stunning first-person view were not enough to impress the public, most of whom were watching it all unfold on CNN, then the images of night-time air attacks were. The scenes I remember best involved the volleys of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire arcing upward at unseen stealth bombers high above. First, an orchestral cascade of lights would fly into the sky, followed shortly thereafter by a brilliant, expanding explosion on the ground. It seemed to be clear evidence of which side was winning. Like many people watching, I was awed by the technology and not thinking of the lives lost. All of it, of course, was broadcast in its full green-tinged glory.

Night vision was another technology that had been sitting around for a while. The earliest version of it was invented by the American army during the Second World War and saw small-scale use in sniper-rifle scopes in the Pacific. About three hundred rifles were equipped with the large scopes, but the poor range of only about a hundred metres limited them to defending the perimeter of bases. Nazi scientists also developed night-vision “Vampir” rifles and mounted similar units on a few tanks. The problem with both versions was that they used large infrared searchlights to illuminate targets so that gunners equipped with scopes could see them. This gave away the searchlights’ position, making them easy targets.

By the Vietnam War, American scientists had improved the technology to use available light, such as moonlight, which again limited use to when weather conditions were good. By 1990 the technology had entered its third generation and evolved to use “forward-looking infrared” (FLIR) image intensifiers, which electronically captured and amplified ambient light onto a display, such as a television monitor or goggles.

A FLIR device displays a monochrome image, usually green or grey, because it uses light from just below the spectrum visible to the eye. The technology therefore needs no additional light sources and functions well in any sort of weather. The new goggles were small, light, low-power and cheap (you can buy them online today for a couple hundred dollars), which is why the U.S. Army bought them by the truckload for Desert Storm. Night-vision was also incorporated into a lot of the military’s sensor and video technology, including the cameras that captured those green-tinged bombing images broadcast on CNN. If smart bombs were miraculous, the night-vision sights used by
pilots and the goggles worn by ground troops were even more so, because they allowed coalition forces to “own the night.” “Our night-vision capability provided the single greatest mismatch of the war,” said one American general.
⁵

After the war, night-vision technology was adopted quickly by the mainstream, particularly in security. Parking enforcement, highway rest stops, tunnel surveillance, transit systems, ports, prisons, hospitals, power plants and even pest inspectors all found it amazingly useful. The spread of night vision closely paralleled the rise of digital cameras, which also underwent their baptism of fire during the Gulf War. Both technologies became remarkably cheap, remarkably fast and began to converge, with night vision becoming a standard feature of video cameras early in the new millennium. As prices continued to drop on both technologies, they soon became standard in just about every camera available, which means that anyone can now create their own green-tinged Paris Hilton–style sex video.

On the military front, night-vision technology continues to evolve, with scientists currently working on doubling the field of view and adding thermal-imaging abilities to goggles. Lord only knows what sort of sex videos will come out of that.

The “Technology War”

The coalition forces had one other fancy new enemy-locating technology at their disposal: the Global Positioning System or GPS we have all grown to know and love. GPS units allowed troops to locate enemy positions and movements with pinpoint accuracy, further increasing the efficacy of smart bombs and units equipped with night-vision. It was a new holy triumvirate of American weaponry that reinforced the old saying, “You can
run, but you can’t hide.” If one technology didn’t find you, the others would.

GPS had its origins in Navsat, a satellite navigation system first tested by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The original system used five satellites and only provided a fix on the user’s location once an hour. The technology was slowly upgraded throughout the seventies and early eighties, when tragedy hit. In 1983 a Korean Air Lines flight was shot down for straying too far into Soviet air space, prompting President Reagan to declare that the GPS, which could prevent such disasters, would become available for civilian use when it was completed. The twenty-four second-generation GPS satellites were scheduled for launch between 1989 and 2000. When the war started in 1991, however, only sixteen had been launched, eight short of the required number to provide worldwide coverage. Nevertheless, the incomplete system—which still provided three-dimensional navigation for twenty hours a day—was pressed into service at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. In the Kuwaiti desert, which was largely devoid of landmarks or way posts, GPS finally delivered on space technology’s long-held promise of making conflicts on Earth easier to fight. “It was the first war in which space systems really played a major role in terms of the average soldier, sailor, airman and Marine,” said a general with the U.S. Air Force Space Command. “This was the first time that space affected the way our troops fought in the battle.”
⁶

With the war concluded, President Bill Clinton signed the system’s dual military-civilian use into law in 1996. Civilian access, however, was not as accurate as the pinpoint precision enjoyed by the military, a discrepancy the government fixed in 2000 to enhance GPS’s usefulness to the public. The amendment
made consumer GPS devices ten times more accurate, to the point where location could be determined within a few metres. “Emergency teams responding to a cry for help can now determine what side of the highway they must respond to, thereby saving precious minutes,” Clinton said. “This increase in accuracy will allow new GPS applications to emerge and continue to enhance the lives of people around the world.”
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