Introduction

      If you haven’t yet watched the short film Slaughterbots on YouTube, you really should do so now. I mean it – stop reading immediately and watch the video before going any further. You won’t regret it, Slaughterbots is short and impressively well executed. Besides, what I say below contains spoilers.

Slaughterbots was created by the Future of Life Institute in conjunction with Stuart Russell from the University of California at Berkeley. The film garnered over 350,000 views on YouTube in the first four days after its release, and was reported on by a large range of news outlets, from CNN to the Telegraph. The fictional near-future scenario depicted in this film in vivid Hollywood thriller style is both entertaining and scary, but is scripted with serious intent. As Russell explains at the end of the video, Slaughterbots is intended to help us see that, while AI’s ‘potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defence’, we must nonetheless draw a line. Ominously, he warns us that ‘the window to act is closing fast’. The key issue is that ‘[a]llowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and our freedom’ (Sugg 2017).

The film opens with a Steve Jobs-like figure speaking on stage at the release of a new product. Only, instead of the next generation of iPhone, the product is a weapon – a tiny autonomous quadcopter loaded with three grams of shaped explosives, and which combines artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology to lethal effect. After proudly explaining that ‘its processor can react 100 times faster than a human’, the Steve Jobs of Death demonstrates his creation. We watch as he throws it into the air, and it then buzzes autonomously, like an angry hornet, over to its designated target – in this case a humanoid dummy. After latching parasitically onto the forehead of this simulated enemy soldier, the drone fires its charge, neatly and precisely destroying the simulated brain within, to the applause of the adoring crowd. If that were not demonstration enough, a video then plays on the giant screen, showing a group of men in black fatigues in an underground car park. The mosquito-like buzzing of the quadcopter causes the men to scatter in fear, only to be killed one by one as the tiny drones identify, track and engage them, detonating their charges with firecracker-like pops. ‘Now that is an airstrike of surgical precision’, says Mr Death-Jobs. As if sensing the concern that is building as we watch, he is quick to reassure his audience: ‘Now trust me, these were all bad guys.’ (Of course, we don’t trust him one tiny bit.) Our concern only increases as he tells us that ‘they can evade … pretty much any countermeasure. They cannot be stopped.’ Another video rolls on the big screen, this one depicting a huge cargo aircraft that excretes thousands of these tiny drones, while we are informed that ‘[a] 25 million dollar budget now buys this – enough to kill half a city. The bad half.’ (Just the bad half – yeah, riiiight.) ‘Nuclear is obsolete’, we are told. This new weapon offers the potential to ‘take out your entire enemy, virtually risk-free’. What could possibly go wrong?

At that point the film cuts across to a fictional news feed that’s designed to help us see the dirty reality behind the advocacy and smooth assurances presented by the Steve Jobs of Death. The weapon has fallen into the wrong hands. An attack on the US Capitol Building has killed eleven senators – all from ‘just one side of the aisle’. TV news reports that ‘the intelligence community has no idea who perpetrated the attack, nor whether it was a state, group, or even a single individual’. We witness the horror of a mother’s Voice over the Internet Protocol [VOIP] call to her student-activist son that ends with his clinical killing by one of the micro drones, as swarms of them hunt down and murder thousands of university students at twelve universities across the world. The TV talking heads inform us that investigators are suggesting that the students may have been targeted because they shared a video on social media ostensibly ‘exposing corruption at the highest level’. Then, suddenly, we’re back on stage with Mr Death-Jobs, who tells us: ‘Dumb weapons drop where you point. Smart weapons consume data. When you can find your enemy using data, even by a hashtag, you can target an evil ideology right where it starts.’ He points to his temple as he speaks, so that we are left in no doubt as to just where that starting point is.

It’s all very chilling, and it taps into some of our deepest fears and emotions. Weapons like tiny bugs that attach to your face just before exploding – creepy. Shadowy killers (states? terrorists? hyper-empowered individuals?) striking at will against helpless civilians for reasons we don’t fully understand – frightening. People targeted on the basis of data gathered from social media – terrifying.

Slaughterbots was released to coincide with, and influence, the first