Review of “Drones to Ploughshares” (2020)
Sarah Gailey (writer).
Read in 2024.
Autonomous military drones are recruited from a dystopian government into a pastoral utopia.
Gailey’s story is a stew of three different flavours of naïvism. The first is in the title: The wishful thinking of Isaiah (ca. 600-400 BCE), where swords are reforged into ploughshares. The second is anthropomorphism: Gailey’s drones take on human characteristics—though not the literal human form—which their design would logically prevent. The third is that, despite the illogical nature of their anthropomorphism, the drones are still depicted as in 1950s caricatures of AI, saying at one point that a paradox “does not compute”.
In 2020, according to a UN Security Council report published a year later, a Turkish-made Kargu 2 hunted down and attacked a human target in Libya. This may have been the first time an autonomous drone—a robot—armed with lethal weaponry attacked a human being. Similar attacks would feature in the war that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They do not evoke naïvism.
References here: Eden (2021).