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Examining the Ethical Implications of Robots in War
Schneier points out an interesting (and long, 117-pages) paper on the ethical implications of robots in war [PDF]. "This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity."
Obviously a country that can send robots instead of soldiers to fight is way more likely to become 'war happy' - so I'm not sure this robot thing is a good idea at all.
Besides, if your enemy expects your robots to defeat their army, what would be the point of fighting them in the first place? Attacking civilians seems a more logical step (I don't think it's reasonable to demand any country at war not to attack only military targets where there's none that can't be replaced easily).
(and no, I didn't read the whole 117 pages, but after a quick glance I reached the conclusion that whoever wrote the title didn't either, so I'm sharing my thoughts on the title, not the PDF)
I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.
As a registered misanthrope, I support anything that kills more people.
"I am KillBot. Please insert human."
If you've got battlebots, why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts, rather than destroy infrastructure and the like?
It'd probably take a mountain of treaties and the like, and of course any organization used to judge the battlebot contest would be rife for corruption and whatnot, but it couldn't be that much worse than what happens around the World Cup and the Olympics...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
"creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity"
Sounds easy to me.
Rule 1 - Don't abuse prisoners.
There, we already have a machine that outperforms humans.
I would have figured that they would skip robots and go directly to clones.
Seriously, though, this sounds like an AI issue rather than a robot issue. If the robot is controlled by some guy with a joystick back at headquarters, you really haven't changed anything. If it's self-controlled, then you have to take into account that there will be bugs, and eventually some milbot will massacre a village somewhere.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Yes. Superior robotic ethics. A regular Ghandi-bot, saving only those who are threatened, willing to die rather than kill in doubt.
That's all well and good... but what of the men who send these robots into battle? What happens to their sense of ethics? Do they begin to believe that their sending troops into pacify a landscape over political differences is a morally superior action? Do they begin to believe that death-by-algorithm is a morally superior way of dealing with irrational people?
There's an endless array of rationalizations man can make for war, and subjugation of those who disagree with them. Taking the cost of friendly human lives out of the equation of war, and replace it with an autoturret enforcing your wishes doesn't make for a 'morally superior' political game. For many, it would make for an endgame in terms of justifying a military police as the default form of political governance.
Ryan Fenton
In other words, for those countries willing to abide by a mountain of treaties, the problem's already solved. It's the other countries that are the problem, and they're unlikely to resolve their differences like this anyway.
Take it one step further and virtualize the whole thing.
Hell, you can use software from the 1960's.
Enter the horrendous movie Robot Jox. But hell, if settling international and territorial disputes means I get to pilot one of those bad boys, sign me up!
Because there's no incentive for both sides to use your battlebot contest. If I've got a bigger, better army than you, why would I cripple myself by agreeing to your robot competition? If I know my robots are crappy, why wouldn't I just take my chances fighting an asymmetric war?
My Apple comp00tar will just upload a virus wirelessly to them and they will all shut down! I've seen it done!
I like basketball!!1!
I cannot remember who said this, but let me paraphrase it. They defined violence as the distance and magnitude of pain that you can inflict on another person. For example:
A knife is more violent than a fist
A baseball bat is more violent than a knife (bludgeoning vs stabbing)
A gun is more violent than a blunt object
A rocket or tank is more violent than a gun.
By their logic, then, a satellite controlled robot that can kill people from thousands of miles away would be even more violent than conventional warfare. Where do we go from there? Our robots versus their robots? Or how about take a cue from Star Trek TOS, we just let a computer simulate an atomic war, and after it determines the casualties, we send random portions of each sides' population to death booths.
Here's a better idea. Lets stop fucking killing each other! End the retarded circle of violence.
Robots from each country fighting each other instead of sending soldiers to war? Wasn't that the premise of G Gundam? Will my dream of finally being able to pilot Mexico's Tequila Gundam finally come true?
Robocop: "Directive 4: Classified."
Dick: "You can't kill me. Any attempt to arrest a senior OCP employee results in shutdown."
CEO of OCP: "You're fired1"
Robocop: "Thank you." *BLAM* (throws Dick, who is no longer an employee, out the window.)
> The transformation of International Protocols and battlefield ethics into machine usable representations and real-time reasoning capabilities for bounded morality using modal logics.
Killbot: "I am unable to target that school full of unarmed children."
Private Skippy: "Now they're armed." (tosses a handgun and a magazine into the classroom.)
Killbot: "Thank you." *BLAM* (incinerates armed terrorists who illegally took over what was once a school, but which is now a legitimate military target)
War is what happens when treaties stop working. You can't have a treaty for some other competition to replace war--if that was the case, FIFA would have replaced the UN by now and Brazil would be a superpower. The purpose of war is to use force in order to impose your will on the enemy, whoever those people may be. The idea is, after your robots destroy the enemy's robots, they will continue to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and population until they give up.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Maybe a script wrote it by detecting some words in the description. Then, however, some bot would have to mod it up. It is this step that makes me wonder. It appears that there is conscious human activity here. Is facetiousness a part of being a geek? Is it possible to really think about these things? Perhaps:
"I will accept these robots as overlords."
Do these killbots have a preset kill limit? Can they be defeated by sending wave after wave of your own men at them?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Not really. G Gundam's tournament was to prevent war from ever happening, because every country was so focused on having their Gundam win the competiton so they put forth all of their time making THEIR Gundam as best as it could be. And don't forget, there were still PEOPLE inside the robots. Gundam's in that were as close to exoskeletons as any Gundam series because it moved as you moved, you weren't using levers and buttons,you were actually punching kicking and running. But just remember: THIS HAND OF MINE GLOWS WITH AN AWESOME POWER. ITS BURNING GRIP TELLS ME TO DEFEAT YOU. TAKE THIS! MY LOVE, MY ANGER, AND ALL OF MY SORROW! BURNING FINGER SWORD!
I mean if you program the robots with Asimov's Laws of Robotics, then what's the problem.
Robot on Robot violence?
Conscientiously objecting robots?
Or - the horror - formulation of a "Zeroth Law"?
I can see the fnords!
When are they going to stop using robots for evil and start using it for good? I want a Natalie Portman "pleasure model" robot and I want it now! Science has lost it's way.....
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Wars are won by those who do not follow the "rules." There are no rules in war. If there were, then there would be a third party far more powerful than either side who could enforce said rules. If there was, then that power could enforce a solution to the conflict that started the war, and there would be no need for war. Said power would also not need answer to anyone, and would be exempt from said rules (having no one capable of enforcing them).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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While I agree that it will not be a purely robot vs robot war, the idea is that since robots are expendable, less collateral damage will be necessary. That is, you won't have a "shoot-and-ask-questions-later" mentality because you can afford to have some robots get blown up by the other side if it meant not shooting innocent civilians.
/Or the robots themselves decide to take over //But then again, we'd get hot Summer Glau robots ///Welcomes hot Summer Glau overlords....
The robots would often have to subdue humans, of course, but this can be done through non-lethal means. What battlebots gives is the ability to selectively use non-lethal force to make your opponent surrender rather than devastating lethal force. You need not even go after the infrastructure. Send in a million battlebots. Maybe half get destroyed. The other half subdues the enemy using non-lethal force. It takes longer to sway dissenters with non-lethal force but it also helps win the conquered population over a lot better if none of them are killed and their buildings, homes and daily lives still remain the same after the conquest.
The problem, of course, comes from when the guys controlling the robots decide that they should remain in control forever...
I've always wondered how HAL or Joshua would interpret:
Rule 1: Kill enemy combatants.
Rule 2: Do not kill or abuse prisoners.
"Take no prisoners, kill everything that moves" would be the most efficient means of satisfying both, especially after friendly-fire ensues.
I don't see how a robot will ever be able to solve an ethical dilemma on the battlefield. It's such a subjective, context sensitive, issue that we're centuries away from being able to handle that digitally. Another thing, I don't think the planet will ever agree to some "let the robots fight it out" type of warfare either. When a country's robot force is beaten they're not going to just throw up their arms and say "good match sir, here take our land/resource you won it fair and square". They'll still resist to the point of sacrificing their lives.
For the forseable future a human will be at the trigger somewhere in line. Maybe targets get pushed en-masse to central command for "destruction approval" and it's just a mouseclick then *kaboom* but a human will always be in the chain.
I think the over the next 100 years we'll see more UAV type combat robotics. Where an aircraft (or tank) is largely autonomous but is getting fire commands and mission details from a central human controller. I've wondered why strategic bombers aren't controlled like this already. Why not send 20 semi-autonomous F16's into a bombing mission rather than 2 or 3 very expensive, but safe, B2's? Maybe you lose one or 2 F16's but you lose no pilots. Overall I think it would be cheaper. (I'm aware that an F16 is not a bomber but there's certainly plenty of them around and they can carry JDAMs just like any other aircraft)
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I don't care much about the Ethics of war, If some one tries to kill me/my people then I think I have the right to destroy them any way I see fit. No the problem I see with this is that Robots are controlled by computers and computers can be hacked. Also you can bet that the military would end up spending half a billion for each robot.
I would suggest that it will work out a little differently. Once battlebots become superior to human soldiers in warfighting ability, most battles will be between bots, with relatively few humans involved. This is simply because the bots will be the superior fighting force, and deployed preferentially by both sides. Only once one side's bot army is defeated would the war become bots against humans, and in that case the losing side would typically surrender rather than face a massacre of its population.
If you decide to resolve wars using only bots (or even by playing out a virtual video-game like war), my bets are that one of the side will realize it can actually physically attack its opponent, while the opposing side is arguing that the random number generator used is unfair.
Add to that that what you want are generally the natural ressources of the country you're invading and that people are expendable, I'd guess that robots would be programmed to leave vital assets intact and wipe out the humans, instead of doing it the other way around. After all, you can run an oil refinery with a few hundred people, and it costs much more to rebuild it after the war instead of just flying in a few workers to operate it.
There is nothing civilized about war and hoping for fair behaviour on either side is hopelessly optimistic.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
No problem we will just send wave after wave of our own citizens at them until they reach their preset kill limit.
can robots smoke marijuana legally?
would robots enforce marijuana laws?
have you ever seen a robot... ON WEED?
Or use an alternative 1960's solution.
Kill all humans !
\u262D = \u5350
There may still be a need for war. The power can only enforce certain rules.
The question of making lethal robots act ethically is far easier in some ways than doing so with humans and far harder in others. On the plus side, robots will not be subject to anger, fear, stress, desire for revenge, etc. So they should be effectively immune to the tendency toward taking out the stress of a difficult or unwinnable conflict on the local population. On the minus side, robots have no scruples, probably won't include whistleblowing functions, and will obey any order that can be expressed machine-readably.
The real trick, I suspect, will not be in the design of the robots; but in the design of the information gathering, storage, analysis, and release process that will enforce compliance with ethical rules by the robot's operators. As the robots will need a strong authentication system, in order to prevent their being hijacked or otherwise misused, the technical basis for a strong system of logging and accountability will come practically for free. Fair amounts of direct sensor data from robots in the field will probably be available as well. From the perspective of quantity and quality of information, a robot army will be the most accountable one in history. No verbal orders that nobody seems to remember, the ability to look through the sensors of the combatants in the field without reliance on human memory, and so on. Unfortunately, this vast collection of data will be much, much easier to control than has historically been the case. The robots aren't going to leak to the press, confess to their shrink, send photos home, or anything else.
It will all come down to governance. We will need a way for the data to be audited rigorously by people who will actually have the power and the motivation to act on what they find without revealing so much so soon that we destroy the robots' strategic effectiveness. We can't just dump the whole lot on youtube; but we all know what sorts of things happen behind the blank wall of "national security" even when there are humans who might talk. Robots will not, ever, talk; but they will provide the best data in history if we can handle it correctly.
I see a lot of implementation problems before even getting involved with the ethical issues. I mean, there's the usual friend-or-foe IDing issues. Then there's the problem of getting the software to recognise a weapon. If you program it to recognise the shape of an AK, it'll pick up replicas or toys or, heck, lots of stuff that looks vaguely gun-shaped. And the enemy will simply resort to distorting the shape of the weapon, which can't be hard to do. Given that it will be a while before AI technology will improve, it doesn't seen any more effective than a remote-controlled car. And as far as the legal issues, this seems like skirting the boundaries, and definitely violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law.
Building better Gundams!
ONLY in this tiny, idealistic, naive, technolologically-biased corner of the universe is a comment like yours judged as being "insightful." In absolutely any other context, you'd be shouted down almost instantly, or at least as soon as the first guy wipes the tears of laughter from his eyes well enough to see the keyboard. If written out, the list of even the most obvious objections to your "idea" may be visible from space.
The Arabs in Israel? I thought it was the Arabs outside Israel who were the problem. Hamas causing bother in the Occupied Territories and all that. The Arabs in Israel itself, I haven't heard that they're such a big problem.
Unless of course you have an unusually broad definition of what constitutes Israel?
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I hope we run them on Linux or some other software much moe difficult to compromise. Then again human error is ever present in code so complex.
Few Movie Plots come to mind on commandeered war robots, but far too many movie plots focus on robotic AI's wising-up and going after their human overlords. Bladerunner, T1-T3, Runaway, Red Planet, A.I. (to a lesser degree), Lost In Space, etc... Help me out here if you want as I am sure I missed many others.
Paper like this are quite hypocrit, for they take
for granted that using robots in a war is okay.
As a matter of fact, the very first consequence
of using robots in a war (if it would ever become
possible, which is not sure) is that it lowers
immensely the price of human life.
This is something that never happened to such
a degree in the history (i.e. : I only loose
a machine, but the soldiers in front of me
loose their *lives*), and this is the question
a *really* ethical paper should consider in
the first place.
But as far as I saw, the paper we discuss
doesn't even spares one sentence about
this question.
I've not read the article...nor do I plan to. The idea of robot ethics is only good at the onset of robot usage in war. Noone wants to see thier soldiers sloaghtered by a machine, so the minute they can they're putting robots in as well, in which case robot ethics are compoletly pointless because the present geneva convention makes no rules regarding the destruction of artificial life forms. Matter of fact it only defends ppl like medics, pow's, unarmed combatants, and civilians, along with some other situation dependant confrontations
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You must be American to have such a screwed up view of whats going on in Iraq and Israel.
And talk it through? Since when did Americans start to respect any treaty that didn't put them in a favorable view? Building a robot army is just the next logical step in alienating the rest of the world.
Consider that robots cost money, the country with more economic power is likely to be the winner in such a conflict. A large part of the U.S.A.'s success in WW2 was the sheer capacity of it's factories which were by if nothing but distance well defended against attack. European nations where under constant attack on their military infrastructure while American Factories where never bombed and even the concept of saboteurs blowing up factories in the States was a ridiculous notion to the Axis. Sure, Blow up the Pittsburgh bomb factory then you still have 20 more scattered about the US.
Robots won't be used simply because a robot doesn't have the discrimination as to who to attack and not to. Despite Orwellian fantasies, the practical upshot is that you would suffer to much friendly fire from such weapons and intense PR backlash. Sorry I don't see it happening.
Telepresence weapons are far more likely, as we have already seen in use.
Japan's Ministry of Agriculture has been denying their work on this. America is full of fully trained pilots for these crafts (Wii, Xbox, Playstation etc).
Suggested reading of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Robert Aspirin's Cold Cash War
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Maybe those robots know not to attack when non-existing WMD are an excuse for war... :s
Privacy is terrorism.
So, why not settle all disputes using video games? That's what it'll come down to, unless the 'bots literally do all the fighting without any human interaction. In a way, Ender's Game gets at this point.
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...you want robots to make love and not war.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
If you've got battlebots, why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts, rather than destroy infrastructure and the like?
It'd probably take a mountain of treaties and the like, and of course any organization used to judge the battlebot contest would be rife for corruption and whatnot, but it couldn't be that much worse than what happens around the World Cup and the Olympics...
Um, we'd use the existing way. That would mean that we'd go to war and find out, which side has the better/best bots. It could also show if it's better to build a million cheap bots rather than 10,000 expensive ones. It may be cheaper over the long run for your government to always have a few hidden stock piles of a couple million cheap bots just in case a war ever breaks out that you'd have some front line cannon fodder before the new guys show up.
You know one aspect that you completely forgot to think about was an entire new sport: Battle Bots the real time action game where you login and help your country take over some one else's country/defend against those nameless evil foreigners.
This would work really good, of course we would have to beat everyone into submission to get them to agree to it first, but it would eventually work. I personally have never had any luck convincing an insane person with rationality. Also I think you will find that a lot of warlords out there already think less of their people than the value of a battle bot. They would most likely prefer to send 100,000 "replaceable" people (that they can't feed because they needed that new bunker/humvee)than lose the cost of one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots.
And what happens as soon as the enemy figures out how to take advantage of the the "international laws" of warfare to beat the robots? Because I certainly can't think of any case in which humans have figured out how to predict and use an AI's behavior against it. Or, better yet, wait until the first time a robot on patrol duty shoots some kid in front of his mommy and a cameraman. It will happen because some combination of behavior and circumstances inevitably will combine to create an input that the robot's programming interprets as "kill." What are you supposed to say? Oops, there was a bug in the software? That ought to trigger big time public outcry.
Unless we get some serious leaps forward in AI, I think our best scenario for combat robots is, coincidentally, the best scenario for combat troops: every person you see is known to be hostile and collateral damage is not an issue. Achieve the objective and don't worry about red force casualties or collateral damage. In fact, the more enemy dead the better, because fewer enemy troops will be left to oppose you.
I'd rather send the humans whose interest is best served by a war to fight each other. For example, if someone who would profit if a dictatorship in the Middle East is to be disbanded really wants it to go away, then he should go over and fight said dictator himself - mano a mano. None of this shit of sending young people over to fight for his oil. Especially, when they joined the military to protect their country and maybe to pay for an outrageously overpriced college education: no one signed up to fight for oil.
Let's save the resources for the robots for productive reasons: medicines, ending poverty, improving education, food .....
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
At this point, one of two things happens. Either you have a whole bunch of robots that go into roblock and melt on the battlefield, which results in a huge waste of military budget and a disgruntled citizenship. Soon to be followed by heated discussions in Congress and Senate, which would result in more fights on the Hill except for the fact that most of the statesmen have been replaced with ethically outperforming robots who go into roblock as well when confronted with the choice of killing contrary representatives or failing to resolve the economic dilemma...
OR, 50% of the robots go berserk out of frustration (since anyone with even a smidgeon of ethics spends about 99% of their time in that state) and start indiscriminately killing everything in sight until their photoreceptors begin processing a color other than red, at which point you have the whole BSG/Terminator/etc. "God, I'm so pissed at my creators for making me ethically superior in every way that they need to f-ing die, one and all--no exceptions."
An ethically outperforming robot would tell use we shouldn't make him. Let's make clean energy and better health and educational programs for all children in the world, instead.
They need to have Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics built in to prevent them from harming human beings.
1) Because violence solves conflicts. If one (ONE, NOT TWO) parties in a conflict is not prepared to compromise (like everyone consistently called "radical" these days), then the only option is violence. E.g. as long as palestinians want to give no land to the Jews, there will necessarily be violence. If one party wants violence and the other doesn't oblige (e.g. what gandhi did) this will result in more violence (in gandhi's case 10 million dead), not in less. In short, pacifism leads to violence, if there is even a single non-pacifist party. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
2) Because you don't have a choice (physically). If you believe in "redivision of richess/land/..." for example, like the indian culture of america did, then you HAVE to use violence ? Why because there's not enough to go around (if there is, natural population increase will take care of that, in the Indians case that's food, why ? simple : the only option for a non-agrarian indian tribe to expand is to kill another, so they regularly killed off one another, in the muslim case because there is only one world). In any socialist and/or totalitarian state it will eventually come to this (even though, yes, it might take 500, or even 1000 years, generally it doesn't even take 5 though, watch Venezuela in the coming year, or just check Caracas' "crime" rate). If you believe in the nanny state (ie. you vote for either hillary or obama or ron paul), this is what you're doing to your children.
3) Because you're psychologically ill.
4) Because you want to. Because you have nothing better to do. (no I'm not kidding). E.g. muslims that want to become "one with allah" by the quran's method (to fight, kill and die for islam like quran 9:111 commands)
Robots will not change this. At all. Besides we're a long way from a self-sustaining self-improving reproducing war machine, which is what it would take to actually be danguerous.
And people willing stepped into incinerators because they were in the "kill zone" of the war simulation?
Didn't we learn from this 60's flick?
I imagine someone wrote a treatise about the ethical implications of tanks, despite the fact that they saved lives (at least, the lives of the men in the tanks). Or machine guns when they first came out, or carbines, or muskets, or arrows.
If the enemy shoots down a robotic plane, nobody gets killed.
What of unintended deaths? Well, there is "friendly fire" and dead civilians with nonrobotic weapons, too.
How about the ethical implications of war itself? What about the moral imp[lications? After all, "ethics" is only a code of conduct agreed to by a group of people. In this case the "ethics" would be decided by the military itself, just as lawyers' ethical codes are decided by lawyers, and journalists' ethics are decided by journalists (or their publishers)
I think "ethics" is being confused with "morals" here.
-mcgrew
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Since venereal disease and rape seem to follow the armies of all nations, I think we should invent robotic concubines for our warriors in the field. It's not cheating unless the robot is self-aware.
Loss of life alone on the battlefield doesn't slow war. Loss of a means and will to fight does. Means to fight doesn't all of a sudden exclude able bodied men and women should whomever or whatever is on the front lines fail them. Switching out men for machines will be a very subtle change in the grand scheme of things, but it ought to lend to at least a slightly stronger will to fight.
Killing more ethically or not, having more efficient killers in the form of robots assures one thing... ...more killing.
And watch, they'll probably be employed to control civilians in the concentration-style camps around the world.
Robots will make war more likely. Which is unethical.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" by Roger Waters
--
make install -not war
I'm not so concerned with bots in warfare as much as I am about placing really frickin unfair spawn points in the battlefield. Isn't unethical to be able to telefrag enemy soldiers with a cheap bot before they even had a chance to see the enemy? Without solving both ethical issues surrounding telefragging and aimbots, I'm afraid warfare will remain an unpopular and unengaging endeavor.
... the primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law...Yes, and when you send in the robots to fight insurgents who do not honor the law, the insurgents will win every time. If it comes to all-out-war the first thing that will be tossed is the international rule book.
When two parties engage in battle, the party that does not abide by all laws will inevitably win.
why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts
Instead of robots... why don't we just have the leaders play a game of checkers.
That's exactly why the current international structures do not work well as they could. Real international structures--as with national or local policing structures--increasingly need to actually have some real teeth AND the ability to override lesser interests (in this case nation-states) with a corresponding accountability to the electorate that can make the former possible in order to work in cases where one party doesn't want to cooperate.
But I think your choice of examples might have highlighted another deeper problem which doesn't seem to often find illumination in online discussions. Just maybe ask whether it is due to a complete transformation of the goodness of peoples' character that a few mere decades ago (and going back further and on and on) whether the US or Europe wouldn't like battlebots to fight against the other; maybe there is still a little capacity for a sense of superiority left over, even if the lessons of out-and-out imperialism have been well-learned the hard way. The killer in me is the killer in you...
No even within Israel's border they are problematic. And stop the accusations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7212394.stm
Consider a war between two powers equipped with robot armies that are superior to human troops. There might not be any real danger to human populations on either side at first, but eventually, someone's army will be defeated. The losing party then either surrenders or begins to take human casualties against an enemy that has already proven themselves superior.
Societies with swarms of machines to fight for them probably would tend to dehumanize combat somewhat as well, making surrender at this point even more palatable, so I find it highly likely that such a war would amount to little more than a giant match of 'Battlebots' with an unfathomable budget.
a very advanced AI robot would fight a war by sending statistical odds to the opposing army of robots, upon which time they would realize which side should surrender.
The ethical overrides will be removed by the side that thinks they might be losing the battle. As long as humans control the robots, robotics ethics cannot surpass human ethics.
Go tell that to John Connor...
It's not a game. Rules in the battlefield get very bent and twisted, when not broken. Like if Chinese robots won't disguise as civilians if US robots can't shoot them.
However, when Iraq refuses to cooperate, or the Arabs in Israel refuse to cooperate, the procedures break down and you're left with two countries that can't reach an agreement without raising the stakes.
Replace the word "cooperate" with "capitulate", and I'll agree with your statement.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
because the winner will decide what was ethical and what was not.
Roger, roger...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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It won't happen. You cannot factor death and destruction out of war. No matter how 'ethical' your robots are, no matter how many international treaties you establish, no matter which party you elect, so long as human beings are (a) imperfect and (b) stopped by death, you will need to use deadly force and you will have wars.
And God help us if human beings are no longer stopped by death.
That's the part that really worries me about robots in war: by eliminating the need for human beings, you make it almost certain that one day one party will be able to continue conducting a war after everyone on that side is dead. Imagine a fanatical group of people who have decided that the universe would be better if everyone is dead than if the other side existed: the only thing that prevents the entire world from being destroyed is their inability to kill everyone. But with robots--shit, this honestly scares me a lot more than Bill Joy's nanotech "gray goo" scenario...
If each robot was assigned to a single xbox live account it would be much easier to manage the ethics.
... parties that declare war would have to deposit XBL points. This allows for various victory formats: "winner take all" or portioned victory based upon % of map / remaining resources.
The subscription would help subsidize the costs of creating the robot infrastructure and you would have humans making the kill/no kill decisions.
Eventually we could give up on actually producing the weapons and blowing up tangable resources
This is my sig.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
We already see the beginnings of this right now. Our own civilian populace is minimally informed of or involved in the current war. No draft, the bullet-stoppers are all volunteers. Unless someone you know dies, why should it affect you? And with the predator drones, do the human technicians know what the unit is used for? The only people in the loop who know what the mission is and who the targets are could be the senior officer involved. Makes it hard to even form a moral objection if you don't know what you could be objecting to.
.50 cal bullets used in heavy sniper rifles. Countering assassin bots like this will be a new arms race like you wouldn't believe.
Personally, the future I look forward to is when advanced robotics makes it possible to wage war directly upon members of government rather than the countries they lead. In WWII, the only way anyone was getting a bullet in Hitler's head was by invading Europe and marching all the way to Berlin with a few million soldiers. WWII was our last total war and by God, what a monstrosity it was. The bomb was supposed to put an end to all wars but all it did was set a certain upper threshold for acceptable violence. Korea, Vietnam, and Soviet-era Afghanistan wars, a-ok. Widening the wars to include China? Not so good. So long as we kept the bloodshed on a budget in proxy nations, global total war could be avoided. But the fuckers responsible on the American and Soviet sides never had to fear for their lives, not unless the nuclear button got pushed.
Well, just imagine what we can look forward to with combat robotics in the future. Imagine a nice little bioengineered mosquito with a a refined palate, one that is only looking for one human on the entire planet to bite, the leader of the nation. Agents release a few thousand mosquitoes engineered to haves such a hankering, let them find their way to the target and take a bite, only they end up also giving the victim some horrible hemorrhagic fever instead. Or just imagine wasps that can inject blowfish toxin. If we don't want to talk about bioengineering, just imagine some little platform the size of a hummingbird that can fly around looking for something to shoot at, carrying a rocket with performance characteristics similar to the
Personally, I think this could be a good thing. When a leader thinks about starting a war, he's not just thinking about the boys coming home in body bags, he's going to be thinking about his own mortality.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
As with any automated attack system, it should shut down in one month if it hasn't received a command signal. That way we don't have a "robots slaughter everyone" sort of scenario.
Of course, if they're really efficient they can kill everyone in a month. So be sure to adjust that window as necessary.
Firs of all, it wouldn't be hard to make robots more ethical than humans, since humans don't have any ethics, no matter how much they talk about them.
Second, that's what "ethicists" do - talk about them. They do that to establish that they're more "moral" than anybody else. That's about it for the value of it.
Third, nonetheless, in distinguishing between Special Ops War and "general" war, you want rules to prevent armies from massacring civilians.
Fourth, unfortunately the corollary of that is that if you have a superpower whose military budget exceeds the combined military budgets of the rest of the world, there is nobody able to compel said superpower to obey the "rules of war" - so they are ignored, as they are in Iraq, where the US military has killed an estimated 300,000 civilians due to trigger-happy troops, loose rules of engagement ("any military age male is a target", which was the rule in Fallujah three years ago), and a five-fold increase in aerial bombing this past year in order to hold military casualties to a minimum in order to proclaim that the war is being won (on the backs of civilians.)
Fifth, that said, if the new robots look like this or this or this or this or this or this, then I for one welcome our new hottie killbot sex toys/overlords.
(Those pics are HQ, click on them.)
Anybody picked up on the fact that this new Terminator doesn't seem to have a designation. It ain't just some T100 or T101 with a female form...And this one is operating independently of John's or Sarah's orders. I think we're gonna find out more over time just what this one really is.
Anybody also notice that John is already getting the hots for her. In the revised Episode 1, he was checking out her butt. In Episode 2, she stroked his neck - for her it was a stress test, but that's not how he took it. I knew from day one the writers were going to try to hook those two up. I think it's tied in to what kind of Terminator she really is.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That's a great idea, but it doesn't account for the human factor. Specifically, just because someone else's army of robots defeats your army of robots doesn't mean you are going to give the winner whatever it is you were "fighting" for. The reason war (not battle-bot games) works is because one side beats the living crap out of the other until one side or the other decides that the prize, be it land, socio-political power, religion, whatever, is no longer worth dieing for.
I suspect it would take a lot of robots "dieing" before that would happen. Most likely, two sides will go send their robots against each other, and when one side loses all of its robots, it starts sending people. Only *AFTER* the war gets costly in terms of human lives will one side or the other capitulate.
If a competition could possibly settle international disputes, I would expect we would have started going to the Olympics rather than going to war a long time ago...
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
... in Soviet Russia, YOU kill robot?
Because the ability to play a mean game of checkers would become the most important qualification for leading a nation. The primary/caucus system in the U.S. would quickly be replaced by a checkers tournament, and hundreds of lobbyists and media pundits would starve to death.
Now that I think about it. . . why don't we just have the leaders play a game of checkers?
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
One of the nice things about robot drone soldiers is that you have much more flexability in using less-lethal weapons. When your boys are out of harms way, ending a hostile threat immedately becomes a lower priority and you're free to taser, mace, netgun, springloaded boxing glove, et cetera, the enemy and take them alive. Hopefully this potental for fewer lost lives on both sides will be taken advantage of.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
"why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts"
I'm going to name mine Goliath. And, I'm sorry Dave, but there's no way your scrawny little bot is going to win.
Sounds a helluva lot like G Gundam, or whatever it's called. Instead of colonies nuking Earth (done already), why not have giant robot pewpewpew slaughter contests on Earth to settle disputes amongst the colonies?
DATABASE WOW WOW
Actually, another thought just occurred to me...in England and South America, sporting events result in rather agressive activity. Have you ever been to -- or watched video clips of -- a football game (soccer" to us Yanks) and seen the spectators erupt in a melee? If we can't even watch a *game* without breaking out in fighting, do you think we would ever walk peacefully away from our homes, our natural resources, our religions, etc. because of the outcome of a game?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It is the same rules as in a knife fight... "There are no rules in a knife fight" - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/quotes
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The first reliable machine gun, capable of killing many people in short order, was invented by a medical doctor named Richard Gatling. He invented the "Gatling Gun" to save lives, because he thought you'd only need one soldier to fire a bunch of rounds a minute, rather than a bunch of soldiers each firing one shot.
Guess we saw how well that theory worked. It's not the tool, but how it's used. Maybe it took a bunch of profound geniuses to invent and build an atomic bomb; now it takes a zealot and a backpack to subvert the technology. Anyone think robots will be any different? Pandoras box to be sure.
It is, of course, infinitely true that all people within America are entirely deluded about what is going on with American politics and foreign policy, while all non-American countries have the American military secrets at their fingertips, know exactly what is going on in the minds of the American government officials, and in fact, should be allowed to throw America into a black hole somewhere for being so unfairly powerful.
Throw into this that, obviously, all American news sources are extremely slanted towards the conservative, pro-American world domination idea. Oh, and also that the internet must be censored, because American certainly can't have access to non-American news sites.
([/sarcasm])
Since when did any country start to respect any treaty that didn't put them in a favorable view?
There I fixed it for you.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
According to Wikipedia, the Japanese did fight the Soviets early in WW II, mainly 1939, around Khalkhin Gol near the Mongolia/Manchukuo border. They lost badly to Soviet General Zhukov's tanks, and did a ceasefire around the time Germany invaded Poland. They didn't fight again until 1945 after the defeat of Germany.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Because there are things in this world that many people find are worth dying for.
If yours were truly an "obvious" conclusion, then there wouldn't have been all those enormous national wars in the 20th century in which "cannon fodder" footsoldiers died by the millions to secure a yard or two of muddy trench.
You have forgotten that the notion that a single human soldier's life is worth more than millions of dollars of hardware is relatively recent, and probably restricted to wealthy Western nations. Plenty of other nations don't think that way, e.g. China or Iran, or nations with a large surplus of 15-year-old boys and not much in the way of high-tech silicon.
You're also thinking of a war between equally tech-competent wealthy First World Nations, the like of which hasn't happened in 60-odd years. This doesn't seem very likely. It seems much more likely that the wars the world will see over the next half century are more likely to be "asymmetrical" wars that pit First World Nations against assorted varieties of got-nothing-to-lose transnational groups that serve as proxies to Second and Third World nations that are trying to carve out a regional sphere of influence. Whether robots are going to be effective weapons in these types of war remains to be seen, although the early signs in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they are.
I hereby decree the official founding of PETR: People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots. No longer shall their rights be ignored by the unwashed masses of humanity. Remember: That robot's rights are far more important than yours. How DARE you send a robot to fight in your place!
Wars should be banned as inhuman, primitive way of problem solving method (remember the time, when beating your wife and kid was okay?) before we are able to build warrior robots, complex enough to raise ethical questions.
If you really break it down, the true financial gainers of any war is a ridiculously low percentage of the entire population of this planet. Their behavior should be outlawed first by the majority, before they can delegate to robots to carry out their crimes.
When I go to live leak and I look at videos on live leak and I see the terrorists getting happy when they have videos blowing up our little robots (now i know there are a lot of vids of them blowing up hum vees too) I am happy that that was not a humvee.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Wow what an astonishing thing to say!
We all know now that Iraq didn't have WMDs just like they claimed when they submitted their accounting as demanded by the US. The US invaded Iraq in violation of the Nuremberg Principals and the UN Charter. Israel is currently using collective punishment against the residents of the Gaza Strip (the blockade has resulted in no electricity, limited potable water, and food shortages.) This is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Why are they doing it? Because the Palestinians elected the wrong party, oops. Israel has denied Right of Return of Refugees for over 50 years now. That's another violation of international law and human rights.
To take this back to the original topic. I think that debating the ethics of robots in war is a bit is just a analogous way of debating more pressing issues, like does economic or military superiority make it okay for a nation to impose it's will by force on another nation or people? Does might make right? At the end of WWII the world community decided that might does not make right. We, the US, have abandoned that in favor of a more barbaric approach. Even after the disaster of Iraq, we are on a course to attack Iran because they are enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants, which they have an explicit right to do under the non-proliferation treaty.
With unmanned drones armed carrying Hellfire missiles, armored tanks vs civilians throwing rocks, and precision guided cruise missiles, the world already have something akin to "robot war."
-- QED
Generally I'm of the belief that the laws of ethics are like the laws of mathematics; absolute, and capable of being determined by those intelligent enough to reason about them. (Side note: Anybody who claims "absolute" morality stems from *any* holy book needs a one-way ticket out of our solar system.)
War is a singularity in the ethical landscape, when all other methods of conflict resolution have failed. It represents the most base/primal ethical instinct available: Might Makes Right. Winners will live, losers will not. It's that simple.
That said, war has but a single ethic: win at any cost short of self-annihilation. Everything else; rules governing weapons, prisoners, rules of engagement, treatment of civilians, etc. that's nice and how we make it look good on TV, but has absolutely nothing to do with the way war is (and MUST) be fought. The only ethical application of robots is to win at any cost short of self-annihilation.
Some people may not want to face it, but that's how the world is; much like 2+2=4 and gravity literally sucks.
Finally, I'm an Old Glory Insurance salesman; we're having a sale on Robot Attack insurance. Offer expires soon!
I read the title thinking it was going to be something about the ethics of sending robots to their death...
I guess people are still more worried about protecting the soft little fleshies than preventing harm to the metal lords.
-Supernova_hq
> It's probably MAX_INT.
I, for one, hope they're two-bit robots.
It's those darn Japanese guy's fault! Never mind that many subassemblies are in fact made in local shops. Never mind that we invented the Kaizan method, but no one here would use it. Never mind that the plant president lives on the same block as my father in-law and makes less than $500,000 per year while my father in-law makes over $200,000. He could make MORE working at an American car company, you know why he doesn't? Because they have crap standards and treat their employees like shit.
It's not the world's inability that's the problem. It's the cheap labor conservatives an their policy of doing anything to screw over the working man and make him desperate enough to put up with anything they dish out. You can bend over and spread for them if you like, but I'm not going to.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Subtract the surplus boy population and your get a corresponding surge of 15-year-old girls. Nice for a culture that encourages bigamy.
hmm, despite that I still don't think I will be Voting for Romney.
How long will it be before a robot makes a decision that killing it's own people is the most ethical (i.e. life saving) response?
They're a lot of the problem. If Israel had treated the Arabs rationally and compassionately to begin with, they wouldn't have a lot of the problems that they do today. However, in recent years they've shown that they're willing to make concessions; when's the last time a ceasefire's worked for more than a month?
Instead of sneering in derision at Three Laws of Robotics, we can now subvert, pervert and ignore 117 pages of "ethics?" Fie. War is about serious differences of opinion about what the law is, or should be, and whoever lays it down and keeps it down has ethics on her side. In any case, our DOD is already run by "ethical robots". We have unilaterally decided not to use AK-47's, for example, because those things stink of ideologically improper provenance, even if they still fire when caked in mud or full of blowing sand or snow, and even if they never, ever, under any circumstances jam in action. Not to mention various urban legends that we're perfectly happy to field armaments bearing electronics made in China. Go figure. Personally, I'm rooting for Skynet.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
If the treaty specified women's soccer, we'd still be the #1 superpower...
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Didn't OCP build a prototype in Detroit?
"Ethics of Robots in War"?
Does the ethics paper discuss lying about the existence of gods who want you to help kill off that god's political enemies for Him?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Too right. If only those damn Iraqi's had co-operated and built some WMD's so that they could admit they had them. Or just handed over their oil when we asked for it. Then the no-one would have had to ignore the majority of the UN, storm in there and get a bunch of soldiers killed to make a point.
At least when we have robot soldiers we'll only need extra robot parts - there won't be any dead people to worry about, so that'll make it much easier for us 'developed countries' to do whatever the hell we want without answering to anyone. Cool. I love the future.
Let's just hope these thing don't run on gas or diesel. The cost of fuel is just nuts.
117 pages, and it's dead wrong on page one, with the statement, "it is universally acknowledged
that peace is a preferable condition than warfare". Such a claim cannot be verified in the affirmative. It is an assumption and a logical fallacy on the part of the author.
Peace on its own is nearly valueless -- sure, it's a great thing when there aren't bombs dropping, but sometimes, bombs dropping is preferrable to peace, if the alternative is living as a slave and oh, by the way, there just doesn't happen to be bombs dropping. Sure, I like peace, but a peacetime Nazi Germany is not something I'd have desired. Peace as a result of Liberty, I'll happily take. I would prefer to live 10,000 years of war in defense of Liberty rather than live 10 years of peace under tyranny. But in that case, it's still not peace that's the value, Liberty is the value.
So, you see, the author's got it all bloody wrong from the start.
Now, had the author taken the tack that liberty is mans' preferable state in which to live, the authors would have realized that war is sometimes _necessary_ to combat a threat to liberty. I'm pretty certain that such a perspective would have changed many of his conclusions, and made his paper a hell of a lot shorter.
That said, here's what my version of the paper would say about just war, and the use of [robotic] technology in warfare:
As individuals exist for their own sake at the expense of no others, the initiation of force against the individual is a violation of his right to his own life. As such, the only just use of force is the use of retaliatory force. There need be no bounds on the use of retaliatory force in warfare; As the initiator of force has rejected _all_ claims to a right to life free of force (by rejecting others' rights to live free of force, they reject their own), you, in retaliation, are under no obligation to restrict the degree or method of (lethal) force in your retalition to spare their lives. Use whatever means is necessary to obliterate your enemy.
To those who would object to the above on the basis of "innocent civilians" caught in the middle, they are not your concern. _Their_ government is responsible for their safety. By initiating force in the first place, it is _their_government_ who put their citizens lives at risk, and they are the sole party responsible for civilian casualties, on _either_ side.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.
WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.
Which is certainly a lot more reasonable than anything we've ever heard out of the Arab states regarding Israel.
But, regardless, even if we pretend that the Israelis were just as irrational and bloodthirsty as the Arabs have been, that's all in the past. Today, Israel has managed to make peace with all of it's neighbours....except Palestine. And the reason for this is quite clear, as you yourself pointed out: "when's the last time a ceasefire's worked for more than a month?".
All you need to do is think back, and ask yourself "Has Palestine EVER made any concessions to Israel, which it did not violate immediately afterwards?".
I used to work on simulations of intelligent self-replicating robots until in the 1980s someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after I gave a talk and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I don't know if he was praising me for saying how easy it was to make destructive machines (the first ones were even cannibals until I added a sense of "smell" for recognizing self and other) or my comments on how much harder it would be to make robots that cooperated with each other (or with people). I think that truth remains and shows in the comments here -- predatory Daleks are much easier to build than a collaborative R2D2. I left the field -- fearing the focus of the military funding was likely to be more on the Dalek side of things, and focused more on augmenting human capacities (whether gardening, storytelling, software development, or rethinking industrial infrastructure to be more sustainable and inherently more secure and abundant and peace-promoting). I can sometimes wonder myself if I should have kept working towards cooperative robots (the scene in Silent Running where the drones performed surgery together was always an inspiration), but ultimately transcending war (to peace? to something else?) is more likely to come from the ideas of people like (Mr.) Fred Rogers, Leon Shenandoah, Mahatma Gandhi, or James Carse.
"Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood: Family Communications"
http://www.fci.org/
"To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah"
http://www.amazon.com/Become-Human-Being-Tadodaho-Shenandoah/dp/1571743413
"Gandhi's Words"
http://www.indiaspace.com/quotes.htm
"James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game, SALT talk"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114
But developing Daleks continues. See Manuel De Landa's book:
"War in the Age of Intelligent Machines"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
"The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to de Landa, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming one single war machine, and when that war machine itself is crossed by the machinic phylum -- this last condition might be compared to Deleuze's call for the desiring molecular machines to use the social machines, instead of being composed and manipulated in order to form a complex molar machines. The developments of artificial intelligence, which will sooner or later lead to the creation of "predatory machines", that is intelligent machines. Even if "the advent of [truly autonomous weapons] may be quite far in the future, the will to endow machines with predatory capabilities has been institutionalized in the [US] military" (p.128) warns de Landa. This disconnection of the war machines from the machinic phylum, of the military institution from the social formation, may result in erratic war machines that become nomads because of a lack of political control: if battles are not strategically ordered following political objectives, then even their victories become meaningless."
And see Manuel De Landa (indirectly) on why intelligent killbots will never work as intended for technical reasons. The implication of what he writes below, is, if an intelligent machine's mind (like a person's) is a mix of hierarchies and meshworks, and receives input from the outside, it will be as unpredictable (or more so) than a person. It might be a good *partner* to people (hopefully for benign tasks like self-driving cars
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-- Gen. George Patton
Wasn't part of the plot of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/ that Gort, the giant robot, was actually an intergalactic law enforcement agent with the task of seeking out interplanetary violence and eliminating it?
Seems to me that this article is actually trying to set out an approach to build a similar group of robots.
I still don't think this is that great an idea in the greater scheme of things. I was an engineer on a college autonomous robotics project http://mdrc.rit.edu/igvc and our robots, which tended to have tank treads and weigh 500+ pounds, did have a tendency to try to attack us if we left out semi-colons in its code (its default state seemed to be set to kill).
I'm not sure that it's ever ethical for robots to go up against men in battle. Manna-a-manno is one thing - I look you in the eye as I kill you, risk my life to take yours - seems fair. A robot going up against a human however is an entirely lopsided proposition since there is an entirely asymmetrical risk involved. Of course they'd be effective for that very reason - they would be fearless and can put themselves in harms way without a thought to their own safety.
Where's the disincentive to war when it's only a matter of budget/technology rather than your own lives at risk?
Whatever happened to the Geneva Convention where there was at least a few rules to try to keep a shred of humanity in warfare?
All the more reason to develop EMP weapons. For every rock, there's a paper somewhere.
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
What about a bot that outperforms in ethical capacity the person ordering the human soldiers to die for Haliburton?
http://imdb.com/title/tt0102800 You think I'm kidding, don't you?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Everyone should be against the this kind of automation in the military. I'm all for better tanks and armor and whatever, but anything that can kill, should be a person. And not because of Terminator or The Matrix or any kind of hollywood crap. Simply because as long as Little Tommy has to go to war, and (more importantly) Little Tommys' mother will start a protest if he dies needlessly, then we're (somewhat) safe from nothing but constant war. But, no-one is going to care if a legion of robot killers is sent out every week, no-one (at least, in the US) is going to care if they march on Somalia and take the whole place over.
The only thing saving us from constant war is the fact that politicians have to justify the deaths of their citizens. Once that stops being the case, there's nothing to stop them. And for this reason, I, and everyone who can think ahead clearly, should be against this idea.
And I have close friends in the military, that I don't want to see die. But I'm still against this.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
That the discussions on robots in war always starts off with the assumption that robots will have some sort of sentient intelligence that is even capable of recognizing subjective ideas like good and evil. Maybe someday in the far off future; not today. Today's robots are dumb as stumps except for one thing: hitting the target. Look at Predator, cruise missiles and various "stand-off" attack missiles. At most they have some ability to also avoid hostiles; no ethics.
Every "robot" currently visualized needs every cycle of CPU power available to it just to complete it's mission. To what extent did the entries in the DARPA Grand Challenge consider the ethics of winning? They didn't and even then only a few of the entries managed to complete the course. This gives you some idea where in the priority queue ethics will come in for future robots.
Just like other weapons, the only hope we have that the weapons will be used "ethically" is if those who control the weapons decide to use them that way. I can't believe that someone put out 117 pages of ethical argumentation for something that ain't gonna happen. It's even harder to believe that some people actually read the drivel.
Don't expect "intelligent weapons" to suddenly refuse to do the bidding of the governments of the world. Hope and work for that those who control any weapons are ethical. Grow up.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I pay taxes, I vote. That should be enough. Buying American is just icing on the cake. In a capitalist system, I'm going to buy what I deem to be the better value, because...that's part of capitalism. I'm not going to restrain myself to products because they were built in a certain country - that sounds like some kind of twisted form of economic welfare if you ask me.
And who said abandoning unions is bad? Depends who you ask, I guess. Me? I think the unions are holding GM back.
Er, a little history? the combatants in "The Great War" were prosperous, powerful, "civilised" European nations bound together by a web of treaties. Newsflash, this did not stop them from pointlessly slaughtering over 40 million people in four years of violent conflict. On that note it's even easier for a general or a politician to send mere machines "over the top" than young men. Treaties guarantee nothing.
I didn't know that, thanks for the info. Ironic.
Link if anyone's interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
What would a robot need with ethics?
*runs*
There's no such thing as an ethical war. or a just war, or a holy war. Changing the adjective doesn't make it rational.
It's not the players you have to worry about ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I feel that the concept misses the point somewhat. War from an early stage was the facing off of the societies best and bravest. Further, in many societies membership of the club of citizenship was predicated by service in the defence of that society, with the associated risk of loss of liberty.
How can a society truly recognise the costs of war without understanding that the risk of loss of citizens needs to be justified? Without that as a check there is little difference between an arcade game (say Civ) and the execution of a remote war.
One of the benefits of a democracy is that it raises the hurdle rate for pursuing war versus say a totalitarian society which has little or no accountability. Without the risk of friends or family serving and potentially losing their liberty can a society truly participate in the degree of conflict and its management.
All I can see is an erosion of the justification of alternative means of conflict resolution.
BTW. The article misses the point that Islam codified the execution of war (in its various forms), and included protocols for parley, ceasefire, prisoners and civilians. You wouldn't have guessed it with the events and their reporting today, would you.
Think of it: Why not to kick a thief in the balls if it is sure to get you ou safely? Same thing for a thief, why not to stab a guy in the back if it will make sure you get his stuff with no trouble? Where is the ethics of this? There is no such a thing as ethics in war. It was, it is, and it will forever be, just a mask to convince civilians that war is not as bad as it sounds.
It sadly says a lot about humans that it's not exactly a high bar to reach.
There are no Ethics in war unless you win.
... kill all the leaders of all belligerents, from PMOTEU/POTRU/POTUS... to all top level GOs, then restart negotiations and diplomacy, failure ... restart .... Eventually the leaders will be smart enough to avoid war and keep peace.
There is no human history without victory.
Ethics and justice
Robots are just weapon systems for the stupid wealth plutocrats.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Prior to the Nixon administration, the United States had never employed its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. It was first used March 17, 1970 over Southern Rhodesia. The second U.S. veto came two years later, when Washington sought to protect Israel from a resolution condemning Israel for one of its attacks on its neighbors. Since then, the United States has cast its veto [...] to shield Israel from Security Council draft resolutions that condemned, deplored, denounced, demanded, affirmed, endorsed, called on and urged Israel to obey the world body.
This paper is a bad omen. We must develop a consensus alternative to the kind of warfare described in this paper.
Here's my contention: humans make choices about when to use lethal force better than machines.
Why? Because only the human mind itself can possibly formulate a choice for when lethal action against a human is justified in the moment of decision.
Why? Because decisions regarding human conflict require logic AND intuition. Machines are only capable of doing logic.
Please read on, if you are interested in how I arrived at that conclusion...
Here are a few basics from the report that I agree with.
1. The military will continue to search for and develop more technology to accomplish its mission.
2. That trend has led to development of unmanned, autonomous, lethal warfighting capabilities (robots)
From there, the report has several fundamental flaws.
1. Incorrect understanding and definition of "war"...philosophers, warriors, politcians, and historians throw the word "war" around so much, it has lost all specificity of meaning. All definitions fail. Human conflict is the central issue. What kind of human conflict should be considered "war"? What is the difference between war and police action? The article took some handy bulleted 'rules of engagement' and used them as basic suppositions for its arguments, when in actual human conflict, those 'rules' are guides at best.
2. Flow charts cannot describe ethical or moral behavior. The academic structures of philosophy, ethics, psychology, etc. have created bloated unnecessary theories of human behavior that can be simply understood by economic terms. We will never be able to describe 'morals' or 'ethics' as actually practiced in everyday life because actual human choices have too many factors to account for, and what those factors are is a matter of perspective. It is speculation at best. Economic theory is best to describe/predict human behavior at any given event, and it is not highly reliable.
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We all know 'what could possibly go wrong' when machines are made with the ability to use lethal force in a human conflict setting. It's a staple of recent science fiction.
Because of the two reasons listed above (i tried to be concise), inevitably, these lethal machines will fail to be better than humans. Of course we can game the system, and make the benchmarks 'fit' to force results that say they have been successful, but in the context of human conflict resolution, they will be worse than the humans they are replacing.
Human beings are the most complicated things in the *known* universe. Nothing is more complicated. Trying to quantify human behavior and use that as a framework for computer programs to make lethal choices is doomed to failure because we do not understand ourselves and why we do things. At least that understanding is not 'known' in any quantifiable way. Sure, theories predict some behavior, but we set the expectations for them low (that's another rant about academia...)
Intuition is by definition unquantifiable.
I propose:
1. We stop developing autonomous technology designed for lethal action, and instead focus our research (and $) towards technology that AUGMENTS humans. In other words, build better suits of armor instead of making something to replace us on the field (some posts above also advocate this and I agree with them).
2. Significantly increase the compensation for our military at ALL levels (even the president). Think about it. Our system uses $$$ as an incentive for behavior. The report lists several survey results given to soldiers and marines about traditional rules of war. The answers were not encouraging, and the report uses those results to make the claim that autonomous could do it better. Wrong...our soldiers do so poorly on those surveys because the current applicant pool for our military is mostly low-skilled and undereducated. If we paid the military significantly more, we wou
Thank you Dave Raggett
One of the criticisms I keep hearing about "killer robots" is the notion that they won't be used because the risk of friendly fire is too great. This has never stopped the US military before. Here's a quick list of indiscriminate weapons the US military uses:
nuclear weapons
cluster bombs and artillery
flechette bombs and artillery
phosphorus
defoliants
"fuel air" bombs
land mines
shrapnel grenades
poison gas
tear gas
rubber bullets and bombs
biowarfare
exploding dolphins (really)
and of course
automatic weapons
The notion that the military won't use a weapon because it will accidentally kill lots of civilians or a few soldiers is pretty silly. They'd use suicide bombers if they could get away with it.
I'm not worried... I have Old Glory Insurance. I'm covered.
Robots will kill us all.
And "I robot" is not about robots, but more about controlling civilians by the use of brainwashed idiots to do the task.
in the end, you can use this independent command thing as a shield.
no news. just old lies.
if we could get one of the Gort robots, we'd be set
I agree with your main point, in that real soldiers have a self-preservation priority that changes significantly if robots are used instead.
My concern is that they still have lethal capability. If you have time read my other post. Basically I do not think a robot can be programmed to make any kind of proper decision about when to use lethal force. I'm pro technology, UAV's (in general), and even armed UAV's (if they are only used in hot battle, not for law enforcement). I'm just against the autonomous part.
I just cannot envision any kind of program or list of rules that would be anywhere near sufficient to guide an autonomous robot with lethal capability. It's too complicated of a decision.
If we stick with non-lethal, or less than lethal, I would support it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
If I remember correctly, it was the one-sided ceasefire by the Hamas that lasted longer than any other. Think about that. Then google what made them revoke it.
In a conflict of that scale, you will always find responsibility on both sides, and discussions as to who carries which exact percentage of the blame are mere sophism that hinder, not help, any process of fixing the problem.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And the fact that Israel has peace with its neighbours has very little to do with how tolerant and nice and diplomatic they are, and a lot to do with the fact that they kicked their asses in a series of short wars.
Again, my point is that in cases like this, both sides carry the blame, and anyone who makes one sides entirely or even mostly responsible is contributing to the problem. There's a lot of literature on that by experts who know a lot more about that than I do, I just study their stuff.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is no such thing as law and ethics in wartime. War is pure violence, aiming to the submission of the opponents. Everything else is just putting at risk your victory possibilities.
How about the politicians duke it out amongst themselves? Preferably with blunt weapons?
...when robots decide not to go to war because they consider it unethical. Of course, that's still a while off, but it's a rather interesting concept to contemplate. If it leads to fewer wars of aggression and unjustified killing, all the better for it.
I don't see much difference between robots and humans, we are just made of protein instead of metal and we are programmed with DNA instead of code. Perhaps anything which is sufficiently complex is alive, so if this hypothesis is true then we can have self-aware mathematical formulas (so think twice before erasing these equations from the blackboard!), self-aware collections of carbons and sugars (animals and plants), and yes, self-aware robots as well. Maybe self-awareness and "life" are nothing else than emergent phenomena of complex adaptive systems on the edge of chaos. If that's true, then robots will at some point become complex enough to warrant having legal rights and citizenship. While I don't believe we will ever be able to build a self-aware robot from ground up, I do believe that existing fields such as alife and the new science of plectics will enable us to understand the dynamics that can lead to intelligence through emergence and therefore will give us the tools to build a simple robot which will evolve to full intelligence by itself and become comparable or even superior to humans. The moment this happens, the military ethicists will have much to discuss for years. What their conclusion will be, I don't know, but probably they will move on an axis defined by the two positions that it is either bad to kill anything which is self-aware (robots or humans), which is also my preference, or that since humans are robots as well then it is ok to kill anything since anything is a kind of robot, after all.
So... international corewars?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising should be required reading.
Robots follow instructions handed down by their programming, period. They do not have ethics. They can't be given ethics. If a robot encounters a scenario its programming did not predict, can it make an ethical decision? No, let's not be trapped into thinking of robots as sentient persons.
What ever happened to the Three Laws? If you don't know what I'm talking about, then learn to read!
Thus, there is no *real* incentive to end the war by any other means than total victory. And what if the other side acquires the technology?
The end result? A war that keeps on going, and going, and going... perhaps forever.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You get an army of "Liberal Robots" who are politically correct. That makes a lot of sense (not). All our enemies need to do is make sure that THEIR ROBOTS are designed to be AGGRESSIVE combatants that will win conflicts - whatever the cost. In that scenario, what do the "Liberal Robots" do? Turn tail and run?? The author doesn't realize that the purpose of war is to break things and hurt people. Anything less may as well be a chess game. Besides, we already have "Liberal Robots" in our midst. They're called people and they aren't capable of thinking for themselves. The disease they have is called cranial-rectal inversion.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game