Jeb Bladine: Memorial Day Weekend merges fiction, reality

Memorial Day Weekend: flowers to the cemetery, a family barbeque, national mourning for military personnel who died in the line of duty, and opportunity for holiday escape into a marathon movie series.

This year, the choices included “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Toy Story,” “Cars,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Predator,” “Rambo,” “Indiana Jones,” and various war movies. I decided to revisit “Star Wars,” first screened in 1977.

However, that “escape” quickly morphed into the reality of today’s news.

“Star Wars” movies like “The Phantom Menace” (1999) and “Attack of the Clones” (2002) featured expendable battle droids, clones and drones on a scale at once comical in fiction and horrifying in contemplation of industrialized, automated warfare and anonymous human attrition.

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As that thought sank in, I watched a CBS News segment, “Inside the U.S. military’s war games using AI.”

Correspondent Chris Livesay reported on a U.S. military training exercise in Morocco where AI centers 200 miles away were processing battlefield intelligence in real time and directing war-game activities.

“Star Wars” delivered implicit warnings that automated, dehumanizing warfare overrides normal restraints. The CBS News segment featured a lieutenant colonel describing current systems that are completely autonomous in taking lethal or non-lethal actions without a human in the loop.

Livesay asked, “What price are you willing to pay to have a human in the loop?” The officer responded, “Well, I guess that depends on the situation, doesn’t it?”

More news this week: Pope Leo XIV presented a sharp call to “disarm” AI from military, economic and human-domination-driven uses. While accepting AI as a tool serving human dignity, he warned against AI-generated morality in systems that lack conscience, empathy and spiritual judgment.

Two months ago, “60 Minutes” aired a report titled, “Drone arms race transforms war in Ukraine, with U.S. now learning lessons.” Correspondent Holly Williams reported:

“Unmanned and remotely-controlled, drones have transformed the Ukrainian battlefield. They’re estimated to inflict around 80 percent of combat casualties on both sides … Forget everything you think you know about warfare. The traditional front line in Ukraine has expanded to a roughly 10-mile-wide strip called the kill zone. Anyone who sets foot there can be spotted by a drone operator — and hunted down.”

Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks, this week on “CBS Mornings,” interpreted Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical as a warning that AI needs a moral purpose tied to human dignity and the common good. In his “Free Press” article, Brooks opined: “If we adopt and embrace AI simply because we can … it will ruin us.”

My mind jumped back 10 years before “Star Wars” to the 1967 televised “Star Trek” episode, “A Taste of Armageddon.” Warring planets were conducting war by computer simulations that calculated fictional attacks, identified “casualties,” and sent named people to disintegration chambers that turned simulated deaths into real victims.

I didn’t finish watching all those “Star Wars” movies. But I did end the weekend wondering if somehow, sometime, the lessons learned could lead us to a world that celebrates its last Memorial Day.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.