The blackouts are back. Johannesburg would be going down the drain if it had any water in its pipes. Zweli Mkhize has clearly subcontracted the writing of his resignation letter to whoever fixes the nation’s potholes. And yet this week it’s all felt bizarrely reassuring to me.
It felt that way because late last week I read a New York Times piece about a report by the UN, focusing on a certain incident that took place during Libya’s civil war in 2019.
According to this report, there is evidence that a military drone pursued, “harassed” and possibly fired weapons at a group of fleeing fighters — without humans controlling it or even being in long-range contact with it.
In short, the implication seems to be that we now live in a world in which killer robots independently select and hunt human targets.
The chief reason I’m not terrified of drones, however, is that I live in SA, which contains almost no diabolical weapons of war because they’ve all been flogged to the Middle East.
It was nightmarish stuff, but some experts interviewed by the New York Times urged caution, pointing out that it remains unclear just how independently this drone operated and chose its targets and, indeed, if it fired anything at them.
There was further reassurance from The Guardian, as artificial intelligence (AI) expert Kate Crawford reminded readers that “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent”, and that “it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous”.
In other words, we can all rest assured that free-range murder-bots are still considerably less clever than humans, a species which believes it’s a good idea to build killer robots rather than to house and feed itself. So at least there’s that.
It was a startling story, but I must confess to you that I’m not as scared of drones as I probably should be.
That’s partly because I’ve seen what happens when you spill coffee on a cellphone, and I am confident that, when the robot horde finally arrives, we will confront it with a million lawn sprinklers hooked up to a billion skinny lattes.
I also can’t help feeling that there is something much more frightening and dangerous than semi-sentient, soulless, murderous drones: the semi-sentient, soulless, murderous people who make them, and who convince governments to buy them, which convinces other governments to buy them, and so on until defence experts are talking quite seriously about “drone swarms” designed to overrun defence systems.
(Aside: it will please you to know that not all drone-fired munitions cause indiscriminate death. Thanks to the Obama administration, we now have something called a “bladed anvil missile”, designed to prevent hard-to-explain mass death at Middle Eastern weddings. Instead of exploding when it hits the roof of your SUV, it shoots out six blades, the whole apparatus arriving through your roof and into your lap like a very large rocket-propelled cookie cutter. So I suppose that’s ... progress?)
The chief reason I’m not terrified of drones, however, is that I live in SA, which contains almost no diabolical weapons of war because they’ve all been flogged to the Middle East. (According to the brave and tireless truth-seekers at Open Secrets, almost half of the weaponry sold by SA in 2016 and 2017 went to the journalist-butchering regime in Saudi Arabia, before a substantial amount of it rained down on civilians in Yemen. The other half went to the UAE, with a very similar outcome.)
Should we be more scandalised by the fact that we have become a shabby little arms dealer for untouchable, murderous regimes? Of course. Will we? Absolutely not. The place where we keep and process such feelings is already as clogged and festering as a Gauteng water treatment plant, jammed solid with cadre fatigue, pandemic malaise, sharp (or dull and depressing) fears about our immediate future and our ultimate fates, and, of course, our inevitable, human hypocrisies around which evils we choose to care about and which we choose to ignore.
So where is the silver lining? Why did all of that ghastliness make me feel so kindly towards Mkhize and the train-wreck formerly known as Johannesburg and even Brian Shivambu, quietly paying back those looted, sorry, “borrowed” millions?
Well, the simple answer is that the killer robots aren’t here, at least not yet.
Yes, the corruption and decay are enervating, and the lies of our politicians and CEOs are insulting. But our skies are clear and open.
Yes, the endless erosion of decency and dignity is real and relentless. But we are bedevilled by extraction, not execution: the opportunists straddling us want to keep us alive, and they want to enjoy their loot out on their balcony, not down in some bunker.
We’re a mess. But it’s a mess of people, most of whom want the same things. Our crises are about relationships, beliefs and expectations, not the monstrous zero-sum game of civil war.
And as long as the robots stay away, SA can rebuild.
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