Waziristan Weeps

په ګران وزیرستان کی غیر اغیار نه منو

Post by Waziristan - The Lion's Den.

The song from the hills and mountains of Waziristan is fitting reminder that Waziristan whilst brave and tenacious, has been infiltrated and damaged by outsiders - jihadist militants, US drones, and Pakistani forces. And now the refugee crisis;  in Pakistan called, IDPs - Internally Displaced People, where even liberal Pakistanis have shut their doors on the human traffic that is the inevitable fallout from a military offensive (Operation Zarb-e-Azb). Déjà vu. We've seen this all before. The events today in Waziristan are not disimilar from the events four years ago: As If Hell Fell On Me.

Whilst the Pakistani establishment turns its offensive on Waziristan as a public reponse to this month's attack on Karachi Airport, there is an eerie reminder that we struggle to move forwards because we don't learn from the past. This is about Pashtuns caught in the middle of a bigger war, yet again. 

Robots of War

I begin with an extract: 

Imagine the face of warfare with autonomous robotics: Instead of our soldiers returning home in flag-draped caskets to heartbroken families, autonomous robots—mobile machines that can make decisions, such as to fire upon a target, without human intervention—can replace the human soldier in an increasing range of dangerous missions: from tunneling through dark caves in search of terrorists, to securing urban streets rife with sniper fire, to patrolling the skies and waterways where there is little cover from attacks, to clearing roads and seas of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), to surveying damage from biochemical weapons, to guarding borders and buildings, to controlling potentially-hostile crowds, and even as the infantry frontlines.

These robots would be ‘smart’ enough to make decisions that only humans now can; and as conflicts increase in tempo and require much quicker information processing and responses, robots have a distinct advantage over the limited and fallible cognitive capabilities that we Homo sapiens have. Not only would robots expand the battlespace over difficult, larger areas of terrain, but they also represent a significant force-multiplier—each effectively doing the work of many human soldiers, while immune to sleep deprivation, fatigue, low morale, perceptual and communication challenges in the ‘fog of war’, and other performance-hindering conditions.

The extract above is taken from this report and it demonstrates that militarily, at least, there is a push to engage with new technologies. Given that Artificial Intelligence like many emerging technologies almost certainly has military patronage, is it feasible to ask if robots programmed to identify and 'fire' on the enemy combatants are one day developed to 'think' intelligently?

Whilst some of this sounds a little like Skynet from Terminator, I do have a serious question. Can we predict the future directions of 'intelligent' technologies? Are people always in 'control'  or could there be a type of artificial intelligence that eventually develops its own reasoning and consciousness and in the process choose break free of control?

Artifical Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that captures my interest and over the next few postings I hope to explore some of the ethical thoughts and issues around this. 

In particular what inspires these postings are Sebastian Thrun's keynote speech at TED last year in which he spoke about Google's driverless car. Thrun's conjecture is that driverless cars can be programmed to scan the entire environment around them and react accordingly, thus making them safer than human-driven cars.

Master/Machine

I like the idea of developing technologies to make the world safer, though in the next posting we will explore a little more about what it means to be 'safe', bearing in mind that 'pilotless' drones do not inspire ideas of safety for those living in the Pak-Afghan border regions. Admittedly, some of these drones are operated remotely and thus there is still a human-control element to them, but there is a pattern of military needs shaping advances in technology. For now, Sebastian Thrun makes a plausible case for going driverless:

Find out more on Sebastian Thrun's speech at TED last year.

Part 2: John Mohammed - Across Borders

Continued from previous posting. Despite the descent into chaos, John Mohammed has decided to fight for his adopted culture.

"I saw the rural, religious Pashtun way of life I had come to love so much being diluted, contaminated and poisoned, in particular by arrivals from the Middle East," he says. "The way they practise Islam is very different to the tribal areas. They use money and influence to impose their own set of values." 

Peaceful Islam

In the early 1990s, John Mohammed joined the BBC World Service Pashto service and helped to set up New Home New Life, a now Iconic Afghan radio soap opera, known as The Archers of Afghanistan. Six years ago, he set up a radio station which broadcasts across the Afghan-Pakistan border and which tries to promote tribal traditions along with peace and reconciliation.

More recently, John has switched his attentions back to Afghanistan and is spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university in the predominantly Pashtun city of Jalalabad.

"It makes perfect sense. There is currently nowhere in Afghanistan where a young man can do higher Islamic studies. They go to Pakistan, where as we know some of them have become radicalised," he says, emphasising that his university will give a platform to moderates.

But this promotion of peaceful Islam has set him on a collision course with militants. His beloved Pakistan has now become too unsafe for him.

"Swat is a militarised zone and people I see as foreigners there now treat me like I'm the foreigner, even though I lived there for 40 years. It's hard to work out who is who any more - who is Taliban, who is criminal. The waters are very muddy."

Download the podcast from the BBC telling this remarkable story.