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Ethical Killing Machines
ubermiester writes "The New York Times reports on research to develop autonomous battlefield robots that would 'behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans.' The researchers claim that these real-life terminators 'can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness ... and they can be made invulnerable to ... "scenario fulfillment," which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.' Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents,' this might not be all that dumb an idea."
...need I say more?
"The New York Times reports on research to develop autonomous battlefield robots that would 'behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans.'
Maybe I'm being a bit pedantic here, but "ethics" is a professional code - for instance, it is completely ethical by military codes of ethics to kill an armed combatant, but not to kill a civilian. It is unethical (and illegal) for a medical doctor to salk about your illness, but it's not unethical for me to.
The waterboarding and other torture at Gitmo was immoral; shamefully immoral, but was ethical.
The advantage to a killing robot is that it has no emotions. The disadvantage to a killing robot is ironically that it has no emotions.
It can't feel compassion after it's blown its enemiy's arm off. But it can't feel vengeance, either. It's a machine, just like any other weapon.
And like an M-16, its use can either be ethical or unethical, moral or immoral, moral yet unethical or immoral yet ethical.
Free Martian Whores!
Ethical Killing Machine? Like military intelligence?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
I was just watching the into to the first "Tomb Raider" movie, where Lara destroys "Simon" (the killer robot that she uses for morning warmup) Robots... I must say, I don't like the idea behind robots fighting our wars, because that means that "acceptable risks" become a thing of the part, and we are Far more likely to "militarily intervene". Aka: "Less risk to our troops" can translate into "we go into more wars" which is something I don't support... wars benefit companies, and lead to the death of thousands. If the lives lost aren't American Lives, does it still matter? in my opinion, YES.
Just the first couple I can think of...
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for defeat on the battlefield.
Soldiers are supposed to want to fight. If you want the Peace Corps, send in the Peace Corps. If you want the Marine Corps, send in the Marine Corps.
The whole things sounds like a bunch of Leftist grad students angling for funding. The concept, given the current state of technology, is a pathetic attempt at political correctness.
Politicians are supposed to create policy, not the military. Once the decision has been made by lawfully elected officials to use military force, it is the duty of the military to implement that decision, not second guess it.
The way the intro to the article is framed indicates a complete knowledge vacuum on the part of the framer. This is the exact equivalent of having your nuclear defense program run by Martin Sheen.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Automated killing machines were banned at the Geneva convention. This is generally a good thing when we're sending real, live humans (versus the walking undead) to fight our wars. It would be completely inhumane (haha) and tilt the outcome of a war towards those who can afford to develop such technology. That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
But imagine if all wars were fought by proxy. Instead of sending people, we send machines. Let the machines battle it out. To be really civil we should also limit the power and effectiveness of our killer robots, and the number of machines that can enter the battlefield at once. Of course, at some point every country will be able to build to the maximum effective specification. At that point it will be a battle of strategy. The next obvious step is to do away with the machines entirely and just get a chessboard.
Whoever wins gets declared the winner.
Makes perfect sense.
Thanks for reading,
M B Dyson
CyberDyne Systems
It takes a special set of skills to corrupt a single human being, it takes another set of skills, not that special, to corrupt an entire battalion of robots, that are all identical. Did I mention sharks with lasers?
insert inflammatory comment here!
An old cartoon had a series of panels. the first panel had a cave man picking up a rock saying "saf forever from the fist". Next panel is a man inventing a spear, saying "safe forever from the rock". And so on, swords, bow and arrows, cata pults, guns, bombs.... well you get the idea.
On the otherhand, the evolution of those items coincided with the evolution of society. For example, You had to have an organized civil society to gather the resource to make a machine gun. (who mines the ore for the metal. Who feeds the miners? who loans the money for the mine?...)
It's a bit of a chicken and egg about which drives which these days, but certainly early on, mutual defense did promote societal organization.
So "safe forever from the angry soldier" is the next step. It's already happened in some ways with the drone so it's not as big an ethical step to the foor soldier, and given the delberateness with which drones are used compared to the dump and run of WWII bombing one can credibly argue they can be used ethically.
On the other hand war has changed a bit. The US no longer try to "seize lands" mititarily to expand nations (economically instead). (russia and china are perhaps the exceptions). These days it's more a job of fucking up nations we think are screwing with us. E.g. Afganistan.
Now imagine the next war where a bunch of these things get dropped into an assymetrical situation. Maybe even a hostage situation on an oil tanker in somalia.
It's really going to change the dynamic I think, when the "enemy" can't even threaten you. Sure it could be expensive but it totally deprives the enemy of the incentive of revenge for perceived injustice.
On the other hand it might make the decision to attack easier.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Iraq became a police action needing law enforcement, not military force, from the moment President Bush stood on the carrier deck saying "Mission Accomplished". From that moment forward using military troops in Iraq became the wrong approach. You don't use the Army as a police force. Any information derived from soldiers misused as policemen is irrelevent.
The only ethics needed or desired on the battlefield is to win the day. Period. Doing anything else is a formula for disaster. As can be shown in Vietnam. We didn't use the maximum force to full effect, we danced around and tried to do everything but defeat the enemy. The result - South Vietnam was overrun and lots of people died.
Once you leave the scenario of the battlefield, you can talk about ethics. You also stop needing soldiers and start needing diplomats and policemen. Consuing the two doesn't work and provably so.
Personally, I think this is a response to the problems of being the established army fighting a guerrilla force. The way guerrillas succeed is by driving the invading army slowly crazy by making them live in constant fear (out of self-preservation), until they start lashing out in fear (killing innocents, and recruiting new guerrillas in mass). The same goes for treating noncombatants with dignity and respect: Doing so makes the occupying force less hated, so the noncombatants won't be as willing to support the guerrillas.
So in short, to me this sounds like trying to win, not ethics.
If we can create things like this, why haven't we previously had robots on the battlefield controlled by soldiers that works like an FPS? I can understand that there would be a lag issue (haha) but you think they would have tried this before going to a completely automated system. As for the fear aspect, I think a soldier would have less of an itchy trigger finger if it was a robot on the line that can just be replaced rather than their life.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
It's the only way to be sure.
To paraphrase my favorite movie of 1986:
It's a machine, Ronald. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes... IT JUST RUNS PROGRAMS!
Ronald's premise makes two key assumptions which are deeply flawed:
1) It's entirely the human soldier's fault that he's unethical.
2) The person directly in charge of putting the robot to work is entirely ethical.
I pose that the soldiers in Iraq haven't been trained to deal with a situation like this properly. The fact that 17 percent of US soldiers in Iraq think all people should be treated as insurgents is more reflective of poor education on the US military's part. The US military prides itself on having it's soldiers think as one unit, and 17 is a very high discrepancy that they have failed to take care of, mostly because there are plenty in the leadership who think that way themselves. Treating everyone they come across as an insurgent and not treating them in the proper manner is a great way to "lose the war" by not having the trust of the people you are trying to protect.
It's that same leadership who'd program a robot like this to patrol our borders and think it's perfectly ethical to shoot any human on sight crossing the border illegally, or treat every citizen as an insurgent, all in the name of "security."
Besides, a robot is completely incompassionate. A properly trained human has the ability to appear compassionate and yet treat the situation skeptically until they know for sure the target is or is not a threat.
This is not a problem that can be solved with technology. The concept is a great project and hopefully will be a wonderful step forward in AI development, but at no point will it solve any "ethical" problem in terms of making war "more ethical."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So, a family is picnicking on a hill overlooking your kill zone.
The toddler gets away and falls down the hill and then wanders into your kill zone.
Is it ethical to kill the toddler?
Machines cannot be ethical because they cannot make decisions based upon less / more ethical choices.
Fatal Error.
Dark alley in a city battle field
Robot "You have 5 seconds to drop your weapon"
The soldiers Weapon clatters to the ground
Robot "You have 4 seconds to drop your weapon"
Robot "The United States will treat you fairly"
Robot "You have 3 seconds to drop your weapon"
Soldier "What do you fucking want !!!"
Robot "I am authorized to terminate you under the Autonomous Artificial Battlefield Soldier Act of 2011."
Sound of running footsteps and burst of weapons fire.
Robot encoded data transmission
Its not the years, its the mileage
I see you're trying to attack an insurgent stronghold.
Would you like me to:
1. Call in airstrike
2. Fire machinegun
3. Wave white flag
They'll be a cinch to defeat. You see, Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, we can send wave after wave of our own men at them, until they reach their limit and shutdown.
-Zapp Branigan
"Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster"--William Tecumseh Sherman
I take serious issue with the part of the article where they mention that most Marines who toured Iraq believe that all civilians should be treated as insurgents. Of course you treat everyone like potential insurgents in an urban combat environment, otherwise you will end up dead. That says nothing about ethical views or the proper treatment of people in general. SWAT teams are taught to consider everyone as a terrorist when they are attempting hostage rescue. That means, that they never take for granted that the apparent "hostage" is indeed a hostage. It keeps people safe.
On the contrary, during and prior to World War II, many enlisted men wouldn't even shoot their guns at other troops. Actually, towards the end of World War I, most European armies turned their guns on their officers en masse (the French Nivelle mutinies, the German naval munities, the Russian mutinies and soldier and worker councils).
After World War II, army psychologists discovered how many men were not firing their guns at enemy soldiers and worked via various means to increase that percentage, which they did in Korea, and even more so in Vietnam.
I don't see Russian soldiers, as that old song goes, "shooting the generals on their own side" if they feel a war is wrong. As I said before, the resistance to kill resides in the enlisted men, the low-level brass on up is much less concerned about this. The US has purposefully and consciously targeted non-combat civilians in every major war it has ever fought, but stating such is a danger to the machine of empire so it becomes something that one can't state. When it is so publicly and undeniably done, such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then it becomes rationalized, but it has happened before and since then.
No self preservation?
Yeah, who cares if our billion dollar terminator squad is destroyed, or captured and used against us.
No anger? That's an emotion, so sure. No recklessness? You're gonna lose the war if you aren't willing to charge ahead blindly, pull a crazy Ivan, or, in general, break a few eggs for your delicious victory omelet.
Scenario fulfillment?
So our robots will evaluate the situation based on what they observe and know. They won't be acting out the battle plan as described because they don't have the whole picture and have seen some things that don't logically fit. Awesome! No more gambits, pincer attacks, bluffs, etc. Those things were too complicated anyway.
Why should noncombatants be treated with dignity and respect by default (and hence, as a whole)?
They typically don't treat our soldiers with dignity or respect, they serve as a political road block for troops and make their jobs harder and more dangerous, they house and support the combatants, and they often become combatants.
Why should ANY group be treated with dignity and respect by default? Seems to me, you used to have to EARN respect, and dignity was a character trait.
But go ahead, build your pussybot army.
"Less risk to our troops" can translate into "we go into more wars"
You don't like wars because people are killed. You're talking about potentially eliminating human casualties in any war.
No he's not. He's talking about this:
Robot wars (heh...) may lead to more lives lost on the battlefields. That's what parent is worried about.
If the lives lost aren't American Lives, does it still matter?
If this question seriously needs to be asked, this world is fucked.
War is hell.
War is ugly.
War is dirty.
War is painful for the victor.
War is devestating for the loser.
War is an act of hate.
War is an act of desparation.
War is that which results from a lack of options.
War is fought for land, resources, women, gods, and pride.
War is the last desparate act when all other options fail and there is no time to think of any new options.
No one desires war, but many choose to profit from it.
War is inevitable so long as we want for things.
When you take away the horrors of war you no longer have war, you have a professional sport.
Now I ask you: If machines are sent to war again men or against other robots is it still a war?
"Inspired by Ender's Game"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
"and they can be made invulnerable to... "scenario fulfillment," which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas."
Bullsh!t.
For a robotic soldier, ignoring information that conflicts with the worldview would most likely be built right into the system.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually there was an episode of Babylon 5 that had that plot.
How did you know I was from Iceland? ;-)
War should be as brutal and as ugly as possible. That way we would have to deeply consider if war is the answer to the situation.
That doesn't work when the brutality of war doesn't get shown to most of the people in one faction of the war.
This happens to be the case in the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reporting which caused the public backlash against the war in Vietnam simply doesn't exist in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
If you think human police or soldiers are bad, just wait until a whole army of robots malfunctions. Hasn't anybody read "With Folded Hands", "Fondly Fahrenheit", or any of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels? This is a bad bad bad bad idea.
The more sophisticated you make a robot or computer, the more its failure modes resemble organic dysfunction -- until they're indistinguishable from insanity.
So how do you reconcile the ethics of assuming every human is not hostile to the tactical reasoning of one of those innocents suddenly pulling out a gun and toasting you. I'm actually more surprised that it was such a small percentage of soldiers who responded that civilians should be treated like insurgents. Until you're sure of their intent, basic tactical reasoning says to assume hostility (not respond with hostility, but still assume it). Seems like a trick question to me. It's also an interesting dilemma of how you would program a robot to not do that and yet still respond to threats. New strategy! Walk up to the robot very calmly and plant a grenade on it's rear. I guarantee you wouldn't get to do that with a human soldier.
To be ethical, it's not sufficient to not do evil. You have to do good as well.
Based on a recent report stating that 'fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents
I cannot fathom how could anybody think that the conclusion to draw from this report is to develop AI to take ethical decisions. I dare say that no one who knows anything about AI research would hazard a guess about when such an elaborate project could come to fruition. What is needed is some sensitivity training for soldiers sent overseas... What do the people who answered this survey think would happen to their wives and daughters if an invading army came in the US with the same ideas about the dignity and respect of noncombatants?
A while ago, I posted a little essay called "Why the Gun is Civilization". It was pretty well received, and got me a lot of positive comments from a variety of people. Some folks asked for permission to reprint and publish the essay in various newsletters and webzines, and I gladly granted it every time, only asking for attribution in return. Recently, I have noticed my essay pop up on the Internet a lot in various forums, most of which I do not frequent. This in itself causes me no grief, but the reposts are almost invariably attributed to someone who is not me. Some are attributed to a Major L.Caudill, USMC (Ret.), and some are merely marked as "forwarded" by the same person. Others are not attributed at all, giving the impression that the person who posted the essay is also its author. In school, we call reproduction without attribution "plagiarism". It's usually cause for a failing grade or even expulsion in most college codes of conduct. In the publishing world, we call the same thing "intellectual property theft". Now, my little blog scribblings are hardly published works in the traditional sense, nor do I incur any financial damage from this unattributed copying, but it's still a matter of honor. I did, after all, sit down and type up that little essay. It may not make it into any print anthologies, but it's mine, and seeing it with someone else's name on the byline is a little annoying. Call it ego, call it vanity, but there it is. In the end, I guess I should probably shrug it off and tell myself that I can produce something that's worth stealing.
It's quite predictable that human beings get emotional, neurotic, indescriminate, and particularly viscious when large groups begin the business of killing one another. The hostilities often last hundreds or thousands of years. The brutality get's nothing less than crazy, and what's predictable is that wholesale badness frequently ensues.
Building a machine to kill more ethically is completely oxymoronic. Build a machine instead that makes it virtually impossible for others to kill "Us". Leaves them (the folks on the other side of the issue) whole, intact, and uninjured. Able to learn the follie of their ways, and that attempts on inflicting death and suffering on others is a bankrupt endeavor. Show them a better way. Demonstrate compassion, dignity, and being humane. Give them "Civilized Alternatives" to address their issues.
Until you begin to deeply respect human life, you have no ethical ground from which to meaningfully advance human life. That doesn't mean become a speed-bump on the highway to escalating violence. It does mean that we can look for ways to manage, and mitigate the damage that fearful, angry, or violent people can perpetrate. We don't stop killing people because it's good for them. We stop killing people because it's bad for us.
...otherwise it becomes easy to conduct.
Autonomous robot killing machines only make it easier to kill people without the guilt of murder, not fight wars.
And we know that we still haven't got it all figured out yet. But you think you can write an algorithm to figure it out?
I was blocking a highway in Baghdad, waiting for the bomb squad to dispose of this bomb on the highway, and we were preventing anyone from getting close to it. It takes the bomb squad forever, and it gets dark. A vehicle drives straight at us, at maybe 90 miles per hour on the highway. That is exactly what suicide car bombs do, which is the biggest danger to American personnel. You have to shoot the driver, or they will ram you and 95% chance you and everyone around you will die.
Having about two seconds to either stop the vehicle, shoot the driver, or die, I had my buddy turn on the lights. The driver slammed on the breaks, skid to a stop maybe 200 meters from us, and threw it in reverse and got the hell out of there.
I knew he just saw a wide open highway, and wanted to see how fast he could go. At that speed, he couldn't have seen us in the twilight. The algorithm would have said to shoot him. He's alive because I'm a human.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
What the hell have opinions of soldiers to do with this? When policy is translated into the indoctrination that it's better to kill 50 random 'other' people than to run the risk that one of your own people might be harmed then there is no respect. And the article serves the myth that problems are caused by soldiers not adhering to army policies.
Intelligent robots could shift the balance indeed, because you can sacrifice them more easily and it's even good business to do so. But on the other hand killing by remote is easier than in real life(well, for most) and it also becomes easier to keep people at home completely oblivious of what's happening in the war.
So there will be interest. Good business, more control over information, and less killed in your own camp. That sums up the morality.
/dev/machinegun2 has been mounted 20 times without anyone being killed, kill forced.
I am the lawn!
As the somewhat trollish parent is modded insightful, allow me to deconstruct the article presented in it a bit.
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or make me do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
Great, so we start with a little black-and-white to make the arguments that follow as clear-cut as the first paragraph, and possibly put the argumentors of a more toned thinking at slight disadvantage.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
Now we introduce generally accepted nice concepts "moral", "civilized" and non-violence, and link those to the obvious method of achieving them, the "personal firearm". This lays a nice "straw man" trap for people directly opposing, as they are seemingly also opposing the aforementioned concepts.
Also note that "some" may find this paradoxical, hinting that "most" see this inherent logic. Great, now some arguments!
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force.
If you carry a gun, I should incapacitate you as soon as possible to prevent you from using that gun, right? So instead of "give me your money", I first hit you from behind and then state my request.
You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.
How many arguments will become more "civil", as stated before, once the other party shows that he/she is carrying a gun? Isn't it actually reversing the balance of force, not negating it?
It may be true that if everyone were carrying guns, some crimes might be prevented as the physically strong would have less advantage over the weak. However, armed confrontations don't usually end up in balanced argumentation, so I sincerely doubt that there might be downsides in such state of matters, and they could even outweigh the advantages.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats.
Use of gun requires certain physical attributes such as aiming, reflexes and visual acuity, which will still remain unequal. Also, the ones who initially were armed with baseball bats are now armed with guns, and are more likely to use them, which still puts numbers and intent on advantage, not the "self-protection". If the unwillingness of gun use would be eliminated in whole population, I'd say we'd soon have more problems created than rape attempts solved.
The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
On the other hand we argument that everyone should carry a piece, and then we prove its usefulness by stating it's superior to several guys with baseball bats. For a level field, the argument should assume that the guys, too, have guns. The only weapon levelling the field here would be few kilograms of C4.
I see that guns transform the equation of "you're the only one likely to die" to "the other person is as likely to die, too". But this essentially only raises the stakes, much like nuclear weapons do to traditional warfare.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make
http://codeandlife.com
since no one has seemingly bothered yet... "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop..."
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
...and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents.
I want to know what was the context in which this was asked. Everyone that has handled a firearm has heard that he/she should treat every gun as if it is loaded, even if it isn't. It is an idea to add safety. It doesn't mean a gun without ammunition will fire. However, if a gun is believed to be clear of all ammunition and it is not, one does not have to worry about causing damage or injury. Similarly soldiers are in an area in which the enemy dresses the same as civilians that are not taking part in the battle. This means, to avoid surprise attack, one must consider that the innocent looking civilian across the street is not so innocent and is preparing to ambush our soldiers. Am I saying all civilians should be fought and shot, as if they were insurgents in a battle? No. I am saying that soldiers treating civilians with the same concept of suspicion and reserve while they are on patrol is not unreasonable to protect their lives. Depending on the context of the question and the situations to which the question is referring, answers can be different when being asked how civilians should be handled.