Orson Scott Card wrote Ender’s Game in 1977. The story of a young gaming genius, Ender, being co-opted by the military to win their war, is a chilling narrative of innocence and military imperative. Card’s story is a sophisticated telling of military strategy, in a time of remote using virtual reality and gaming. Ender is asked to engage in “mock” battles in virtual rooms to defeat enemies. The battles become progressively more difficult, requiring the young genius to work with teams of other young, brilliant children to advance through the “game”. All the while, the survival of humans pivots on this child’s military acumen. He doesn’t realize he is in space actually battling a real enemy until the end.
This is a sinister commentary on child soldiers and remotely controlled killing. The development of autonomous weapons systems— weapons controlled by a complex algorithms— was at the heart of a deeper discussion of the ethics of war at the Convention of Conventional Weapons in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2014. By 2030 or 2040, at least a fourth of U.S. soldiers will be replaced by robots and drones according to General Robert Cone. And tech is already playing a significant role on the battlefield, with flying drones that drop missiles, remote-controlled machine gun-firing robots and BigDogs that can carry 300 pounds of supplies. It’s not entirely impossible to imagine entire wars being fought by computers.