Doomsday Scenario

Well, spent part of the weekend doing laundry and trying to catch up on classic movies out on DVD (man, gotta love the library); this week's selection was "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Considered a classic of SF films, it chronicles the arrival of the alien Klattu and the robot Gort to our planet as they try to dissuade us from pursuing our violent, nuclear-armed ways. Rather enjoyable, and considered daring at the time for it's anti-atomic weapons stance amid the Cold War, McCarthyism, and similar paranoid national stances.

However, something at the end struck me as odd. The message that the friendly, if stern, alien delivers is to disarm or be destroyed. Klattu's explanation is that the advanced races of the universe disarmed and given enforcement to a band of police robots like Gort; at the first sign of aggression, the robots destroy the offending planet to a burnt cinder. Thus, no one can risk being aggressive and everyone lives in peace.

Fine and good. Except, is that the same logic that drove the arms race during the Cold War, one of mutually-assured destruction? But hey, you answer, their system is better because it doesn't rely on human frailty - the cold logic of the machine makes the judgment. But haven't we learned that machines are also fallible, and that cold logic alone can often fall short when reality is involved? I mean, isn't that the point of movies like "Dr. Strangelove" - that a machine's black-and-white judgment (or, to keep with the theme of the blog, on-off binary judgment) often magnifies a small error (like a broken recall code receiver) into a huge error (global destruction). Think about it - would you want to give your computer the power to obliterate the world? Gives "screen of death" a whole new meaning.