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New Laws of Robotics Proposed for US Kill-Bots
jakosc writes "The Register has a short commentary about a proposed new set of laws of robotics for war robots by John S Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Unlike Asimov's three laws of robotics Canning proposes (pdf) that we should 'Let machines target other machines and let men target men.' Although this sounds OK in principle, 'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
Are for books and movies.. In the real world the only law is to win. You cant come in 2nd in a war.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
1) Spell "Asimov" correctly when submitting an article to Slashdot.
2) The military will program their toys to kill everything and everything, and to hell with Asimov (right up until they turn on us)
3) Humans already count as collateral damage in warfare. Damn the men, spare the oilfields!
This assumes a level of optical recognition that is missing in current robots. Also, once you let these things go, there is a ton of reliance on the programming and the technology. In my opinion, there should be no autonomous robots on the battlefield. Drones are one thing, with the pilot safe elsewhere, but completely automated robots are another.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
It's like RoboCop: You shall not harm any employee of the your owners. But you have the authority to find a way to get them fired, and THEN kill them. And no one found any problem with this until their boss was dead in front of them, and they realized they could be next.
Honestly though, I see value in a policy that no human life should be risked in automatic death systems - including land mines and other traps. These loopholes make that policy as useless as some RoboCop parody though.
Ryan Fenton
There aren't any immediately-practical uses for robotics laws, but if it gets people thinking about ethics & technology I'm all for 'em.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The article summary doesn't give the right impression... the proposed policy would allow machines to target military machines. (see p.15-16 of the PDF) Page 23 is the most interesting, saying that anti-personnel landmines are looked down upon in the international community because they linger after war and kill civilians, whereas anti-tank mines aren't looked down upon so much, because they can only misfire during an armed conflict. So the policy is mostly intended to address international political responses to war, not to prevent sentient machines from taking over the human race.
Though, it would limit somewhat the extent to which machines could enslave the human race... if humans never took up arms, machines could never take lethal action against humans. That doesn't mean machines couldn't control humans politically/economically/socially (eg. deny food, deny housing), but it does mean they couldn't take up a policy of overt extermination of all humans, unless humans decided to fight to the last.
Until a robot can think, in such a way that it resembles how a human thinks, I think coming up with "laws" such as these are next to useless unless you want a philosophical discussion or a what-if scenario. We have hard enough time trying to get robots to recognize images for what they are (AFAIK some high end surveillance systems for the government can do this on a primitive level -- ie it can't learn to recognize much beyond it's programming) - how would you program such arbitrary, human concepts? Do we wave our hands and make it so?
Is it just me or is a discussion of ethics laws for robots premature given the state of the art in artificial intelligence? If you want to teach a machine not to harm humans, it helps to first teach the machine the difference between a human and every other object it encounters.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This reflects how real wars are fought, too. Name me one war in all of recorded history that did NOT involve first dehumanizing the enemy by all sides involved. We see that even today, with German soldiers posing by pictures of the skulls of defeated enemy, or American soldiers posing by naked and shackled prisoners. You think these soldiers would be capable of such flagrant human rights violations if they first pictured their opponents as human? This isn't about a few bad apples, it's a product of training.
(As the character of Travis put it in Blake's 7, "I reacted as I was trained to react. I was an instrument of the service. So if I'm guilty of murder, of mass murder, then so are all of you!")
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm a 03 in the Marines and we have rules about certain weapon systems similar to this.
.50 cal machine gun, because thats inhumane(gah), but we CAN target his boots, his body armor, his weapon, or any of his gear. So if anyone asks, we do that.
For instance, we can't target a person with a m2
Who needs fancy new robots, the marine corps makes robots the old fashioned way: With brainwashing!
This is total nonsense. First off, the Afghans _did_ beat the russians, as the Russians pulled out and stopped attacking. They didn't beat them in a strategic sense with tanks ans planes and whatnot, but they still clearly won. Secondly, your anecdotes don't makes sense. If the Celts that are around today are the same ones that were around to get the crap beaten out of them a thousand years ago, then guess what, the Romans are fine we just call them Italians now. Winning isn't bad, witness the USSR, the third reich, the Persian empire, on and on, for whom losing didn't work out well.
You're confusing governments with peoples. Yes the Irish are still around. So are the Italians, so, in fact, are the Germans, Japanese, and Brits. Winning or losing wars rarely affects that, with notable exceptions like the Native Americans, for whom I think it's pretty obvious losing was a bad thing. What aren't still around are governments. And while winning might not make one last forever, I think Hitler and Hirohito would tell you losing is much worse.
Seriously, the only way winning would not be a virtue, is if it led to complacency, arrogance, and ultimately weakness. But even then, you would have to _lose_ a war for it to matter. And really, with the exception of the Native American's most peoples have survived, and there's really no one to outlast. You are thinking of governments, and trust me, just because you can't think of the names of the governments that disappeared (fair because winners write history) they did.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
"War is Hell"
Ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Ever talked to someone who was there or a civilian in European WWII?
War sucks. It's supposed to suck. Without the pain and suffering that war can bring to all sides of the battle, winners and losers alike. Perhaps the generals should go watch Star Trek Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, circa 1967.
That society has done such a nice job making war "clean" that they have decided to continue fighting a war for 500 years rather than just figure out how to make peace.
In most societies, people are taught that violence against others is fundamentally bad. This becomes a moral element that entwines all the people within that society. It also motivates the same people to find ways around doing violence.
If you study anything about the Nazi camps in WWII they had a growing behaviour where the soldiers in the concentration camps knew what they were doing but absolved themselves of any responsibility by hiding behind the statement, "I was just following orders", thereby removing themselves morally from the actitivies. After WWII this was considered to be a War Crime and has been backed by hundreds of trials across the world.
Fast forward 60 years and we are at a point where the soldiers who are operating a computer screen which operates these killer robots can absolve themselves from any responsibility of moral involvement because the Laws will simply allow them to say, I was just operating a computer program. And while this is going on, there is no one left to come back from the battlefield to serve as a reminder of just how bad war really is and how important it is to avoid it.
At the same time if we are going to commit to a war, we had better be willing to do it to completion even when it gets ugly. I'm pretty pissed at the news for giving us daily body counts of 4 and 10 soldiers on a 5 year battle. In contrast, WWII was hundreds to thousands a day and everyone was sticking to their plan. Everyone was commited to the plan and everyone knew why they were fighting. Vietnam wasn't so clear cut. It was rather vague as to why were where there and even on day one, not everyone was convinced we needed that war. And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
They'll get their killer robots and their legal loopholes to kill anything they want and no one will really do much because it's clean and doesn't interfere with "Dancing with the Stars" and the sheep continue to bleat