In future wars, we’ll have to fool robots: Taking battlefield lessons from the recent Tesla car failures

“All warfare is based on deception,” wrote Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, in “The Art of War.” As far as we know, Sun Tzu never grappled with the specific problems of electronic image processing by machines, but the principle still holds in modern times. If war is based on deception, future wars are going to involve tricks to fool robots.

Or at least, that’s the theory from infrastructure theorist and author Geoff Manaugh. Manaugh’s inspiration came from a minor tragedy: the first death from a self-driving car failure. A Tesla, running on autopilot, thought the white side of a tractor-trailer was empty space, and didn’t brake in time. It crashed, killing the human inside and sparking a federal investigation. It’s probably safe to say this is something both federal investigators and Tesla engineers are working to prevent in the future.

Manaugh’s thoughts, meanwhile, are about replicating that kind of failure in a military setting. He writes:

For all the talk of a “robot-readable world,” in other words, it is interesting to consider a world made deliberately illegible to robots, with materials used for throwing off 3D cameras or LiDAR, either through excess reflectivity or unexpected light-absorption.

Manaugh’s work primarily deals with organizing cities, with the built structure of human life, so his further recommendations are specific to that. For example:

Finding ways to throw-off self-driving robots will be more than just a harmless prank or even a serious violation of public safety; it will become part of a much larger arsenal for self-defense during war. In other words, consider the points raised by [robotics researcher] John Rogers, above, but in a new context: you live in a city under attack by a foreign military whose use of semi-autonomous machines requires defensive means other than—or in addition to—kinetic firepower. Wheeled and aerial robots alike have been deployed.