China accelerates military humanoid robot development

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when they mistake the absence of formal centralization for the absence of centralizing power: they look abroad, see a state directing the labor of researchers and the resources of an army toward a single fixed object, and call it strength, when it is in fact a different and older disease than the one democracies suffer from, though its consequences for the free world’s habits of mind are no less corrosive.

I have never visited China, and I will not pretend to the sociological intimacy with her institutions that I once claimed for the American township. But the report before us - that the People’s Liberation Army and its researchers are accelerating the development of humanoid robots for warfare - requires no visit to analyze, because its interest for me lies not in Beijing but in the mirror it holds up to the democratic peoples who receive the news. What is notable is not the robot. Machines of war are as old as war itself, and the Chinese state, being what it is, does what centralized and undivided power always does: it fixes upon an object, concentrates all available will upon it, and proceeds without the friction of consultation. This is aristocracy’s old efficiency wearing a modern uniform. It is not novel. What is novel, and what deserves the attention of the free citizen sitting in Paris or Philadelphia reading this dispatch, is the effect such reports have on his own governing instincts.

Consider the mechanism. A democratic public, upon hearing that a rival power is accelerating any technology touched by the word “military,” does not respond with the deliberative caution that self-government requires. It responds with a kind of anxious deference - it says, let the specialists handle this, let the ministries coordinate, let the funding flow without the usual delays of legislative argument, because the adversary is not waiting for our committees to finish their work. I have called this before the tendency of democratic peoples to trade the trouble of freedom for the comfort of being led, and nowhere does that trade complete itself faster than in matters framed as national survival. The stakes here are described, accurately, as concerning the future nature of warfare and the balance of global military power - and it is precisely stakes of this magnitude that dissolve the citizen’s appetite for oversight. He reasons that a slower, more contested process is a luxury his side cannot afford, that the People’s Liberation Army does not pause for public hearings and so neither can his own government’s engineers.

Here is the danger that a straightforward military analysis misses: the actual robots are years from any battlefield, and their strategic effect is speculative. But the psychological effect on democratic institutions is immediate and measurable in the habits it produces. A defense ministry that persuades its legislature to waive the ordinary scrutiny of appropriations because a foreign researcher somewhere is “accelerating” a program becomes accustomed to persuading it again. I think of a subcommittee chairman, a man elected to ask inconvenient questions of contractors, who finds it easier - and who is not tired, in an age of accelerating announcements from abroad, of asking the same question twice - to accept the classified briefing and vote the funds. Multiply that chairman across every technology now touched by the word “arms race,” and you have described not a military posture but an administrative habit, one in which the tutelary power of the state grows not through conquest of the citizen’s rights but through his voluntary and repeated abdication of the trouble of examining them.

I do not counsel indifference to what the Chinese army is building; a free people that ignores the capacities of a rival does not remain free for long. I counsel only that the free peoples measure their response by their own deliberative institutions rather than by the tempo announced by their rivals. The old despotism conquered provinces. The new one, arriving by way of anxious imitation, will simply have persuaded free men that the age no longer permits them the time to govern themselves - and it will find them, when the robots finally do arrive, extraordinarily well armed and extraordinarily out of the habit of asking why.