Killer Robots and the Moral Dilemma of Automation (1 of 2)
I once sat inside a flight simulator, slowly blacking out.
“Flight simulator” doesn’t do the machine justice, but those are exactly the right words. There are the software simulators, which show you the ride. And there are the physical simulators which bump you around on a small crane. This wasn’t like that. This was the whole experience, and I was about to wash out.
I was in a windowless white capsule roughly large enough to represent the space inside a fighter jet. The capsule was attached on its right side to an enormous joint that could rotate it in any direction. And the whole thing sat suspended at one end of a roughly 100-foot-long centrifuge that filled a hangar-sized room.
The contraption can produce pretty much any sensation an airplane can — certainly as much as you or I would ever be conscious enough to experience. The trick is that while I was actually spinning in a circle, the image on the screen tricked my brain into thinking I was traveling a linear path through open sky. I had already made it through what the manufacturers would consider a modest test of acceleration. As the screen image told me I was rocketing upward toward an imaginary sun, the centrifuge spun faster and faster, and eventually I experienced six times the force of gravity, enough to crush my face and torso…
