Michael L. Dertouzos Quotes
If we can’t stop fighting with one another, maybe we can delegate the job to robot soldiers fighting robot enemies, thereby destroying hardware instead of killing people!
Michael L. Dertouzos, Director, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, What Will Be, 1998
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The Chancellor was referring to the United States George W. Bush proposal for war with Iraq.
He anticipated smart bombs and missiles, drones, and cyber warfare. However, 25 years earlier, he observed the technology of defense and thought attacks might never again be feasible. See {626740}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
Military robots including drones are very inexpensive as military hardware goes. And like other hi-technology devices, the prices go down steadily as volume grows. Almost any government can afford to buy military robots from the U. S., France, Russia or Israel. As a result, there can be many more nations who can have a modern military, even if small. Thereafter, they can conduct modern warfare readily.
Michael Leonidas Dertouzos was a Greek professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) from 1974 to 2001.
