by P. W. Singer
“Confirmed.” The bot stood stock-still, and then its right hand grasped the gun.
Keegan took a deep breath and turned her back to the machine. It was hard to hear with her ear protection on, but she could swear that she felt the auditory click of the gun’s safety.
She burst through the doorframe of the next room, kneeling this time. Two targets—Keegan engaged the first one on the right. Two shots to target center.
TAMS entered the room just behind her, with its pistol extended forward in two hands, the gun at the point of the classic triangular shooting position.
Once inside, the robot transferred the gun to its left hand, to better engage the remaining target from its position at the doorway. Keegan jerked back, surprised at the unexpected movement. She should have known, though, that right or left hand wouldn’t matter, and it didn’t need the second arm to steady the gun like a human would. The gun fired and a mass of orange exploded on the target’s chest, center mass, knocking over the robot target.
“Stand down, TAMS,” she said to the robot. The robot engaged the Sig’s safety and affixed the pistol to its breastplate, where a magnetic spot held it. The bot’s designers had thought of everything.
Noah yelled down from the catwalk overhead. “Holy shit. Never seen that before,” he said.
“Me either,” Keegan said.
“Would have been useful for us back in the day.”
“Maybe,” she replied. She could think of scores of Marines who might still be alive with a bot like TAMS, a few of them with names etched on her arms. But it might not have made any difference, either.
“We gotta let it run through totally on its own, maybe do it with something more lethal,” said Noah.
“Not going to happen, Noah,” said Keegan.
“Aren’t you curious? C’mon, we’re off the grid here. What do you say, TAMS? How would you like to try?”
“Agent Noah, my security protocols do not authorize any use of lethal weapons, nor non-lethal fire without human authorization.”
“And there it is. That’s exactly the problem,” said Keegan. “Anybody who has to ask to shoot first is going to be too late to take the shot that matters the most.”
“OK, then. How about we test it out using wax bullets? Try it versus my guys, instead of other bots. Be useful for us to go against something other than the vacuum family.”
“Another time. But I do have something we meat sacks need to talk on, Barney-style,” said Keegan. Noah nodded in assent, getting the signal from her use of the Marine term for needing to break down a complex situation, referencing the old children’s TV show.
As they exited the Kill House, Keegan ordered TAMS to stay by the entry. She and Noah silently walked to the compound’s perimeter. The noise of one of the HRT unit’s V-290 Valor tilt-rotors prepping its engines nearly drowned out the conversation—as protected as they could get from audible tracking.
“So what do you really think?” Keegan asked.
“It’s damn impressive, and a little bit of a horror show. That thing is nothing like what we had. It’s like some evolutionary shit, going from tiny roaches to a Neanderthal, but in like seven years instead of seven billion.”
“I think your prehistoric time line might be slightly off, but I get your point.”
“So what’s the deal, though?” Noah asked. “They really want you to prove we can use that thing in the field?”
“That’s the part I’m not sure of. Dep director was giving mixed signals on that. One of those read-between-the-lines conversations.”
“Well, watch your ass, both bureaucratically and literally . . . and don’t forget what Gunny said was rule number one with bots.”
“ ‘Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.’”
As she said it, she patted the Leatherman multi-tool that she always kept nestled in a black sleeve on her belt. She thought of the figurative graveyard of overpriced but undertested bots that had been sent to their unit, and then “accidentally” broken in training or gotten lost in the desert, never to be seen again. Better to force a catastrophic overheating, melting memory chips and batteries into an explosive boil, than risk real lives.
“That’s right,” Noah said. “If a bot puts you at risk, you put it down. Maybe it overheats, maybe trips down some stairs. No matter what, man before machine.”
“Woman,” corrected Keegan.
Constitution Avenue and 17th Street
Washington, DC
“God Bless America!”
The target fit the profile of the exact sort of human the robot had been programmed to approach. He was an adult male, thus legally authorized to purchase. He was geographically located on the end of the raised island of land that held the Washington Monument, a few feet from the four-lane street that divided it from the next block of land, which held the Lincoln Memorial. This marked him as within the established operating perimeter; after annoying too many White House and congressional staff, the robot had been geofenced to the center rectangle of the National Mall. And in the 103-degree-Fahrenheit weather, the man’s posture indicated tiredness, in this case leaning against the aluminum gatepost at the end of the stone wall that ran out from the slight hill on each side of the street.15 Each of these observed data points indicated decreased human resistance.
“Hello, my friend! Are you a patriot too?” the machine asked. As it rolled closer to the man, it played a warbling, distorted clip of the national anthem.
It was a hybrid-bodied robot, the concept pulled from an old NASA system, now commercialized almost beyond recognition like so much else of the space agency’s work.16 A six-wheeled chassis—the wheels on each side painted red, white, and blue—supported the upper body of an Uncle Sam mannequin. Its mouth only opened up and down, while the voice, designed to sound gravelly, came across more like gurgling from the machine being left out in the rain too many times.
“Yeah, sure,” the man replied, closing the lid of a metal thermos in his hand.
It was better to go through the dance, Jackson Todd thought, playing the part both for the machine and anyone watching. Just another wayward tourist talking with one of the robots licensed by the Park Service to roam around the Mall—nothing noteworthy.
“Well, then, I’ve got something special to show you,” Uncle Sam said. “Would you like to see it?”
Todd recognized the simple programming tricks designed to provoke the most basic of human emotions—curiosity and greed, the same algorithm that the Serpent had first used on Adam and Eve.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
At that, a square aluminum tray slid out from what had been designed to look like the beltline of Uncle Sam, a weathered silver eagle as the buckle. On the tray were seven rows of rolled-up miniature American flags, each row holding seven of the souvenirs.
It was sloppy design, Todd thought. They could have made the tray rectangular, so the flag layout was five by ten. Or they could have kept the square tray and had the flag that the customer bought pop up from the middle, as a sort of prize that completed the set.
“As you can see, there is nothing more special than the American flag,” Uncle Sam said. “Would you like to buy this symbol of liberty for only fifteen dollars?”
“Not interested,” Todd replied, now truly annoyed.
It was these small details that mattered so much. A single flaw could undermine the most complicated of systems. It was the same with the metal gatepost against which he leaned. The gate served a dual purpose. Set beyond the old stone Lockkeeper’s House that marked the edge of the now paved-over canal that had run through Washington in pre-railroad days, it decorated the opening in the slight hill that ran along Constitution Avenue. In the event of heavy rains, it also held the floodgate insert that would block off 17th Street and channel the water safely away.
“I do have an end-of-the-day special, just for you,” Uncle Sam said, the human’s negative verbal r
eply taking it down another planned decision tree. “Ten dollars is as low as I’m authorized to go. It will be the best purchase since Louisiana!”
Seeing the Uncle Sam robot mindlessly following its protocols for exploiting human weakness, something welled up inside Todd. He decided the risk was worth it. “I’ll take it,” he said.
Todd pulled a thumb-sized stick from his pocket. Tapping the machine’s pay pad, he debited $10 in Bitcoin laundered from a trading market based out of the Caymans. He’d drop the stick at the steps of the Smithsonian Metro station on his way out. Someone would pick it up and create a whole new trail of purchases through the city. If he was lucky, it’d be a tourist, and the data points would jump across the country, or even the world.
“Now please select your flag, touching the one you want,” Uncle Sam said.
Todd stepped closer to the robot, so the tray pressed close between their chests, and he ran his left hand just above the field of forty-nine flags. As he did, his eyes took in the surrounding area, double-checking that no one was near and that the stone wall still blocked the traffic camera on the other side of the street.
“This is the one,” he said, pressing the point of the flag located four rows back, one row in. When the tray closed, the empty space would be directly above the robot’s recharging port.
“An excellent choice!” Uncle Sam said. With an audible snap, the flag unlocked from its holder. Humans could not be trusted to take more than they were permitted, even the patriotic ones.
Before pulling out the flag, Todd unscrewed the lid of his thermos and poured a tiny amount of liquid into his palm. To any observer, including the robot’s own sensors, he was merely washing his hands before handling the flag, either out of respect or sanitary precaution at touching something who knows how many others had grasped before him.
Todd reached down, gripping the flag as silvery liquid ran from the inside of his hand. It trickled along the flag’s thin wooden pole and into the holder. As he twisted the miniature flag upward, Todd gave the flag a slight tap on the edge, so the last drops fell into the bottom. There, they pooled slightly into a metallic globule that was already transforming at the molecular level.
“Thank you for making America great,” Uncle Sam said.
The tray slid back inside its body and the robot’s fate was sealed. As long as the weather stayed humid and above 85 degrees over the next week—now certainties in Washington, DC—the gallium would transform the hard metal of its insides into sheets as delicate as a saltine cracker.17 Liquid metal induced embrittlement, perfectly harmless to a human, deadly to a machine.
“It’s my duty,” Todd replied. As the robot rolled away in search of more humans to target, he turned his attention back to the aluminum gateposts.
FBI Academy
Quantico, Virginia
Keegan looked at the cup of espresso in front of her, studying the intricate patterns in the crema. She blew on it faintly and breathed in the rich aroma. For thousands of years, she thought, people had done the same at the start of their uncomfortable conversations.
“I guess we should start,” Modi said. He opened his eyes, as if seeing the neutral grays of his walls, each holding a beachwood-framed seascape photo, for the first time. At least they were actual black-and-white prints, not those faintly shimmering e-inks normally found in corporate environments, changing images to match the productivity and emotional mandates of the hour.
“Guess so,” said Keegan, making a point to look him directly in the eyes. It was not just a challenge but also said she saw through the childish game Modi was playing with his hair. She did note that his eyes were a muted brown, almost nondescript, compared with the shimmer of colors in his coif.
“You like the coffee?” he asked with an easy smile, as if her challenge had been completely expected.
“I’ll drink anything, but yeah, this is excellent,” she said.
“Kenyan.”
His way of signaling that he had read her service jacket. Keegan nodded in acknowledgment.
“So how is it all going?” he asked.
“With the bot?”
“Sure, start there.”
She nodded over at TAMS, standing next to the wall, silent. “You want to have this conversation with it in here listening?”
“Yes. Consider these meetings not just a check-in for you, but also for TAMS, and what the two of you make together on your journey toward human-machine progress,” Modi said. “That’s my role here—taking the two of you and seeing how you can be one. Or maybe it is three to one,” he added with a smile.
She sipped the coffee, which tasted of the expensive beans they used to buy before Jared lost his job. “You know that this is something big you’ve been pulled into,” Modi continued. “I know you didn’t have much of a real choice. And that’s why I’m involved, to be a resource. Because in my experience, when the stakes are high, it can make simple things a lot harder.”
“You’re just figuring this out?” Keegan replied, raising her eyebrows at the way he emphasized his “experience.”
Modi conceded the point with a chuckle and sipped from his cup. He paused, waiting for her to fill the dead space, an obvious tactic of these sessions that both knew he was using.
After ten seconds, she decided to get on with it. “Shouldn’t we be drinking bourbon or something if you’re trying to get me to spill my guts?”
“More like open your mind.”
Keegan grimaced and set down her cup. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“OK, then. Tell me about the training so far. I understand you chose to test TAMS out here on the facility.”
“Yep. I read all the documentation, but best way to start a burn-in is to see what we’re working with, beyond what the designers claim. So we did the obstacle course and some range time.”
“And how do you think it did?”
She noted that he asked not about TAMS’s performance, which he’d likely already downloaded, but her thoughts on it. “It’s got real mobility, especially for urban. Usually you can get a bot this big to work only in a linear way, but it’s not like that. But I’m sure you already saw the feeds.”
“I did, and I have to say it was exciting, particularly watching it adapt and learn. Was it the same for you?”
“It’s quite capable,” she said, holding back.
“I wasn’t able to track the footage or access metrics from the shooting range, though,” he said, tilting his head slightly, as if in a challenge.
Keegan savored the sour bite of the last sip of espresso, now cold. “Yeah, turns out HRT doesn’t share its feeds with other offices. Something about operational security, but I think it’s just because they don’t play well with others.”
“So . . . besides the fact that you could do so without prying eyes like mine watching, was there any other reason you choose the Kill House instead of Hogan’s Alley?”
“Because not just you, but it”—she nodded at TAMS—“could pull video of Hogan’s. A large part of why it excelled at the obstacle course is that it had searchable data of what to expect, what it needed to know. But the world isn’t always like that.”
“A good reason. How did it go?”
“Seemed to work OK.”
“I think we could use a bit more detail than that . . .” he said.
“It helped me clear rooms at a pace I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own,” Keegan said.
“What about Agent Reddy? Any strong reactions from him?”
“Noah’s always been chill. He just rolls with it.”
“Nobody with HRT just rolls with it. How about you? Did it change how you viewed TAMS?”
She hoped Noah wasn’t going to have to go through a sit-down like this. “Not much. I’ve seen robots shoot before.”
“Not ones with arms and legs.”
“True. We had lethal ones on deployment for things like sentry duty and hunter drones you could fire off with preprogrammed enemy vehicle ta
rgets.1 Kept our distance from those, usually. None of them fired so close to my ear, but no surprises.” She deflected. “How about you? Do you think the bot should be shooting? Alongside me? Or before me?”
“It is faster, more accurate.”
“Sure, it’s a helluva piece of technology. But it also got stuck like a kitten in a tree on a simple obstacle course.”
“True. But there is a certain beauty in that,” Modi replied. “The imperfection, that inability to do something we take for granted, becomes something memorable. In turn, it reminds us that the thing we think is difficult is not hard at all.”
Keegan cocked her head. Modi’s file wasn’t accessible to Keegan, but by the way this conversation was going, it sounded like he had been in graduate school or fellowships while she’d been deployed. On a mission, there was no time for abstract consideration of what it all meant. Instead it was ABC—Always Be Charging. Both yourself and your bots. That was the hard reality, stripped down, like the unrelenting way sand blasted away the paint on even the most up-armored of vehicles. When it was something that really mattered, the test was only whether you and your machine were functional.
Modi noticed the change in her posture. “You seem to disagree. Why?”
Time to change the direction of this.
“Look, I see where this is going. All the wranglers went through SERE,” she said, referring to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course that had been developed to help US prisoners of war resist enemy interrogation.
“You’re comparing this to torture?” asked Modi incredulously.
“Of a sort, just with good coffee . . . You want hard talk then?”
“It’s not about what I want. The most important thing to usable robots is building trust.”2