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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!
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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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.
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.
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
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.
No, that's absurd. Who cares if you win the day if you lose the war? If you get bogged down in that kind of short-term thinking you're doomed to lose in the end.
We didn't win in Vietnam because the Vietnamese were willing to take horrific casualties, not because we weren't willing to attack with maximum force. Hell, we firebombed villages and deforested entire regions, what exactly else should we have done?
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
That is less a question of ethics and more one of stupidity.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
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.
"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
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?
"Why should noncombatants be treated with dignity and respect by default (and hence, as a whole)?"
Because they're _non_ combatants. By definition, they're not fighting.
If you treat the population as a whole as though they're combatants, what incentive do they have to remain noncombatant? If you treat them like human beings, maybe they'll decide that you're better than the combatants and side with you...
"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."
Wow. I'm stunned, really. Think that through for a minute--if everyone was disrespectful towards anyone they didn't already respect, how would anyone earn additional respect?
Game theory shows that the most successful strategy is to assume the best of the other party, and only betray them once they have betrayed you.
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.
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.