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U.S. Army Robots Break Asimov's First Law

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fourth-law-is-don't-look-at-me-i'm-hideous dept.

buanzo writes "The US Army is deploying armed robots in Iraq that are capable of breaking Asmov's first law that they should not harm a human. SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute. " update this story refers to this article from 2005. But com'on, robots with machine guns! I don't get to think about that most days!

8 of 821 comments (clear)

  1. Not really... by jargoone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From TFA:

    They are still connected by radio to a human operator who verifies that a suitable target is within sight and orders it to fire.

    While they are harming a human, it's ultimately a human that makes the decision to fire. And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?

    1. Re:Not really... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?

      I think it's this point that is the most salient. Asimov's laws are interesting, and make for good "debate over your adult beverage of choice" fodder, but they are just one persons take on a single use case for a particular technology. Those laws might make sense for industrial and domestic helper robots, but wouldn't apply for military (obviously) or law enforcement roles. Certainly a law enforcement robot could be trained to limit the amount of harm it inflicts on a perp to neutralize him, but some amount of harm may be necessary.

      Bottom line is that as robots actually do start entering more into our mainstream lives, some "real" thought needs to be given to how to make them as non harming to humans as possible. These laws, while laudible, can't be "programmed" as is, making the task much more complex.

    2. Re:Not really... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Besides, the average marine has about a high school education, no morals and a low threshold for the sanctity of life. They might as well be robots anyways. :-)

      Sorry folks there ain't no draft and it isn't a mystery that the US war machine is a "tad" corrupt. you sign up for the military because you want to profit from the misery of others. That is unless you sign up for the military to do something outside of being a grunt [e.g. doctor, engineer, etc]. Then you're ok.

      These people you so casually dismiss as "robots" sign up, generally speaking, when they're eighteen or nineteen years old; they believe, almost without exception, that they are doing so to serve their country, to protect the Constitution and the flag and Mom and apple pie. And you know what? At most times throughout our country's history, they've been right.

      Just a few years later, if they're unlucky enough to have enlisted at a time like the current one, they're old men, scarred by things no human being should ever have to see. That's what war (any war, including the "good" ones) does to people. That doesn't happen to robots.

      I started out as one of those nineteen-year-old grunts; a couple of years later, dimly sensing what was coming down the pike, I cross-trained as a medic, in which capacity I served in Desert Storm. I had no desire whatsoever to "profit from the misery of others" -- I wanted to serve, and I was, relatively speaking, one of the lucky ones. I don't have anyone's death on my conscience. I do have memories of things that will give me nightmares and flashbacks for the rest of my life ... and mine was a very, very short war. What those kids over there are going through now is so much worse I can't quite get my mind around it.

      They're not robots. They're your son, your niece, your little brother, caught up in a horrible situation not of their own making. Don't take your anger out on them. Save it for the evil old men who never exposed themselves to that kind of horror, who would never allow their own children to go through it, who casually, thoughtlessly, cheerfully send other people's kids off to hell.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:Not really... by rk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I thought the point of Asimov's stories was that they always obeyed the laws, but not necessarily in ways humans would. Most stories in "I, Robot" show that these seemingly excellent and fault-tolerant laws could have unexpected and sometimes dangerous consequences of their own, and that the real-world is too complicated to ever be dealt with only hard and fast rules.

      You're right though, I never understood why people took Asimov's laws as a great thing to use as a reference for robot behavior when the same author who created them proceeds to point out their flaws for an entire book's worth of short stories.

    4. Re:Not really... by AlterTick · · Score: 5, Insightful
      A lot of people think Asimov's laws are real, and don't get it that he was a sci-fi writer, not a scientist in the field of robotics. He was even asked to speak at universities as an expert on robotics when all he had done was write some stories. If they had read the robot novels, they would have noticed that even Asimov's robots did not always obey the laws.

      Indeed, I think anyone who reads "I, Robot" and comes away with the notion that the Three Laws are a good idea should be barred from working in robotics entirely. Asimov's short robot stories drive home again and again how those hard-coded, inviolable laws are a very, very bad thing, and taken to their ultimate end, could result in the human race basically being reduced to animals in a robot zoo! Seriously, I think too many people read "I, Robot" when they were too young to grasp the serious philosophical point behind it, and haven't bothered to re-read it since.

      The book uses robots as an analogy for a very serious philosophical point about humanity: codified rules are not a suitable replacement for people educated in ethics, science, and rational thinking. No set of laws, commandments, edicts, or mandates passed from On High will ever match every situation. Knowledge is the only way forward.

      --
      Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
  2. Ridiculous Laws by Illserve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The very idea of a rule against hurting humans implies that a robot knows:

    1. What hurting means
    is it pain? death? financial impact? what about indirect effects? If I help human 1 build a better mousetrap, I am indirectly harming some other human's way of life.

    2. What people are

    3. Where they are

    These are highly non trivial problems. In fact, they're unsolvable to any degree of certainty. They only make sense in a *science fiction* book in which a highly talented author is telling you a story. In the real world, they are meaningless because of their computational intractibility.

    In the real world, we use codes of ethics and/or morality. Such codes recognize the fact that there are no absolutes and sometimes making a decision that will ultimately cause harm to someone is inevitable.

    So can we please stop with these damned laws already?

  3. Re:Am I the only one... by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I firmly believe in the right to bear arms -- all arms.

    Sorry, have to differ with you there. I don't want a tac nuke in private hands, because I don't believe you're capable of only hitting those who are actually posing a threat to you personally. I also wouldn't let you have land mines, pursuant to the common law principle of prohibiting reckless endangerment.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  4. A few thoughts.... by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First: two observations:

    1) SWORD is remote controlled it is not autonomous like I always thought a true robot in the Asimovian sense had to be.
    2) Since we are now including remotely operated vehicles in the definition of a true robot, SWORD is not that different from a Paveway bomb or a Hellfire missile except SWORD doesn't self destruct when it destroys the target.

    This begs the question wasn't Asimov's first law broken decades ago, perhaps even by the V1 which was strictly speaking a remote operated vehicle?

    Personally I won't begin to worry about Asimovs laws as long as Humans are on the other end. apons.

    --
    Only to idiots, are orders laws.
    -- Henning von Tresckow