A Killer Rig

“We won!” John Dohe, the CEO of Reoltuff Motors reported to his board of directors.  “We beat out GM. Ford, Rivian, and Tesla.  Just got the official notice about the army contract to build the next generation of ACIR’s (Autonomous Combat Infantry Robots).  This will be big since it reflects our experience and leading position in building autonomous long haul big rigs,” “Good work and congratulations, John,” said the Board Chair.  “The long hours that your project team put in plus a strong lobbying effort, paid off.  How soon do we start?”

“We’ll be using the autonomous driving program for our rigs as the platform and we’ll build the combat requirements on top of that.  Our driverless rigs have been on the road for four years now and have been accident-free except when another vehicle was involved and was at fault.  So it’s a pretty well-proven place to start from.” 

ACIRs had largely replaced human infantry except in guerrilla warfare, where human irregulars still predominated as the enemy.  The trend towards using robots in combat began with the Ukrainian War, where the outnumbered Ukrainians ingeniously developed armed drones on land, sea, and in the air to take the place of humans and successfully used them against the Russian invaders.

Bill Sams, the lead engineer on the team, provided the Board with an overview of his plans.  “The military already has their friendly fire avoidance system, FIDS (Friend ID System), operational.  Basically an electronic dog tag that all personnel and all military equipment carry that identifies an unknown as friendly and not to be fired upon.  In contrast, the SKF (Seek and Kill Foe) attack module identifies all non-FIDS persons or objects as potential legitimate targets to be destroyed.  SKF is designed so that if the ACIR has exhausted its weapon stores it will continue to engage the enemy physically by ramming until it is disabled.  It should not be difficult to modify our existing driving program to add these modules.  We’ll just need to disable the collision avoidance system for non-FIDS encounters.  The ACIR vehicles themselves have been tested on all possible terrains and in weather and are mechanically reliable.  It remains to fit them with the with software and weapons.”

“Is there human oversight of the SKF before firing on a target or is it fully autonomous?” asked one of the Board members.

“It depends on the situation  If combat is occurring in a setting where there are civilians mixed in with the enemy, then a human observer would make the final firing decision.  If there are no civilians involved, then the ACIR would follow its programming,” replied Sams. 

“Any other questions?” asked Dohe.  “If not, we’ll let Bill go back to work.”

What seemed like a fairly straight-forward situation; of adapting a highly successful truck highway program to combat use, proved to be more difficult than envisioned.  But Sams’ team  finally succeeded and the first ACIRs passed their military trials with flawless performances.

However, in the process of adapting the civilian highway program to military use, some elements of the SKF combat software had been introduced, contaminating the program.  How this occurred was never fully determined: whether by programming error, maliciously by a disgruntled employee, or as an act of industrial sabotage.

Whatever the cause, the result was a stretch of horrific accidents on the interstate involving a newly manufactured Reoltuff rig.  (Civilian vehicles of course do not carry FIDS and so would become targets for SKF.) Two miles of the interstate was littered with smashed vehicles and the dead and injured.

One factor limiting the toll from being even worse was the fact that long haul rig were built one by one as orders were received and not mass produced like sedans so only one newly built rig carried the faulty software.  The other mitigating factor was that big rigs are not as maneuverable as smaller vehicles and so the collision avoidance system in on-coming traffic worked to prevent some head-on collisions.

But vehicles going in the same direction as the rig were not so lucky and were crushed from the rear.  There were terrible accidents.  The worse involved a school bus returning from an excursion that was rammed from the rear and driven off the road and into a river.  The rogue rig itself was finally stopped by a missile from a National Guard helicopter. The lawsuits that followed drove Reoltuff Motors to the cusp of bankruptcy.  Fortunately for the company the army continued to order ACIRs in large numbers.

Someone had to be blamed and Bill Sams became the scapegoat and was “early retired” with an aluminum parachute.