Robotics Prof Fears Rise of Military Robots

An anonymous reader writes "Interesting video interview on silicon.com with Sheffield University's Noel Sharkey, professor of AI & robotics. The white-haired prof talks state-of-the-robot-nation — discussing the most impressive robots currently clanking about on two-legs (hello Asimo) and who's doing the most interesting things in UK robotics research (something involving crickets apparently). He also voices concerns about military use of robots — suggesting it won't be long before armies are sending out fully autonomous killing machines."

Comments

"Friendly AI"

[Baldrson]

This is one of the things that makes me think the concern about "friendly AI" is blown out of proportion. The problem isn't making sure teh AI's are "friendly" -- its making sure the NI (natural intelligence) owners of the AI's are "friendly".

If half the effort spent on "friendly AI" were spent on examining the ownership of AI's, there might be some hope.

Re:"Friendly AI"

[Shihar]

As dark as the potential for drones can be, I think it actually has the chance to make war a far less indiscriminate and bloody thing.

Right now, if a square of Marines gets fired on, they can return fire. A square of marines has the firepower to flatten a village. Give them access to artillery or air support, and they can literally level a city. In other words, whenever you have a squad of supported marines fight, you are having a group of kids (and they are just kids) holding their finger over enough firepower to take out a small army. Their job is to use as little as that firepower as humanly possible. You might be able to level every building in a half mile radius, but you are not supposed to. When it comes to a firefight though, especially a desperate firefight where soldiers have their lives on the line, they, like most humans, choose life over death, and if that means flattening an entire apartment building to get at one sniper, they do it and hope that no one else was inside. Generally speaking, unless a soldier walks up to a civilian and splatters their brains on the floor, they are let off free. It is war, your life is on the line, you take your risks and respond in the best way possible. If a civilian gets accidentally whacked, that is sad but acceptable. Most soldiers develop a pretty thick "us vs them" mentality that see civilians if not the enemy, as hostile terrain, especially in a guerrilla war.

Drones offer up another possibility. It is true, you can order a drone army to go out and kill civilians and it is probably easier to get a soldier to do it. That said, if you policy is civilian murdering, a nation like the US doesn't need to use drones. You can handily exterminate all life through impersonally aerial bombing. What drones offer is more control over the rules of war. Rules mean little when you are surrounded by gunfire. You do what you have to do to survive. On the other hand, when you are sitting in the US with a military lawyer over one shoulder, a commander over the other, and and every single second and action you take is getting recorded, rules are a lot more enforceable. If the rules call on you to die before you level an apartment complex just to get at one sniper, a drone can simply die. A soldier generally wont.

With drones, you have complete accountability for your actions. You can always go to command before doing something. You never need to make snap judgments. Hell, you can call a damned military lawyer over and get his take on the rules of engagement. Further, every bloody thing you do is being recorded, so if you decide to start murdering civilians you will be caught and tried.

On the balance, I think drones are going to lessen the lives lost. The few potential abuses are pointless to worry about. If someone wants to exterminate another people indiscriminately, you can do it the cheap old fashion way of aerial bombardment. On the other hand, if you are an army that wants to enforce ironclad rules of engagement, drones ensure there is never an excuse for fucking up, and that fuckups get caught.

Re:"Friendly AI"

[tsm_sf]

I'm not really worried. I'm sure we'll hear about some 'bot wiping out it's own platoon in the next decade, and that will be the end of semi-autonomous killbots.

In fact, I'd be very surprised if this didn't happen in the next ten years. Armed robots are a great idea in that they'd cost less than a fully trained human and are more easily repairable. It's a natural way to go for the military. I also know enough about software development to see that a catastrophic failure is fairly likely, and that the idiot-proof failsafe they'll set up will turn out not to be and won't, respectively.

Re:"Friendly AI"

[Eivind]

Agreed. Suffering own losses is pretty much the only thing that in practice limits the willingness of some leaders to wage war. It doesn't limit it all that much either, truth be told. But the endless rows of young american men coming home horisontally, DID play a major role in turning opinion in cases like the Vietnam War, and I think it'll do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq. The american public tire of sacrificing an endless row of their young, for issues and countries they don't really care -that- much about.

Already, technological differences means that the US can wage war with very low body-counts. Around 4500 US soldiers has been killed in Iraq, which compares favourably with the ~100K Iraqis who's been killed. (a 1:20 ratio, aproximately). I do not think the US public would've accepted the war (many of them don't accept it, even now) if the ratio to be expected had been closer to 1:1.

I can't help but wonder how many wars the next Bush will choose to engage in, if it can be done with a 1:100 ratio, or a 1:1000, or a 1:5000. If you could overthrow a major government, while losing -20- of your own men, would the reluctance to do so be smaller ? I think it would.

Re:"Friendly AI"

[shervinemami]

Its true that military robots & technology are trying to be used to make warfare more "clean", so that the desired targets can be bombed with the least damage to civilians. That is good, atleast in theory, BUT at the end of the day, it is still all going to be controlled by the military leaders that don't necessarily know who are the civilians and who are the targets.

I have actually worked on a military robot for intended deployment in Iraq, and our military officer explained that when you are in a place like Iraq, you don't know who the enemy is and who the civilians are, because even if you see a 5yr old girl with her innocent looking grandmother and you ignore or help them, they are just as likely to try to secretly attack you as someone dressed in military uniform. So the US military in Iraq has to basically assume everyone that isn't a US soldier might be the enemy and therefore they can convince themselves that the ethical thing to do is kill anyone they see that they aren't completely sure is on their side.

So it doesn't matter whether the soldiers have basic weapons or latest military robots, they are still in the mind-set that any civilian can be considered part of the enemy's military.

The main advantage of military robots to the USA is that the countries that USA invades will be much poorer & less advanced countries than USA, so the enemy wont be able to make use of cutting-edge military technology compared to America.

If you don't believe me, put it this way: if Iraq had just as many military soldiers & robots fighting in USA as USA has in Iraq, do you still think people would see this the same way? The "Iraq War" and the "Afghanistan War" aren't wars, they are one-sided invasions, so its very different than if those countries were actually bombing America on a daily basis.

Re:"Friendly AI"

[ultranova]

That's just it -- human nature never changes. The general can order genocide but it's up to the soldiers to carry it out. The My Lai Massacre was stopped by a helicopter pilot who put his bird between the civilians and "told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers."

Yes. On the other hand, the reason that My Lai happened in the first place is that people had been under constant stress and simply snapped. Had the entire war been fought with robotic soldiers, and instead of body bags only scrap metal had been sent back home, would the general had ordered a genocide? I doubt it, for there would have been no emotional involvement, and no stress and bottled-up hatred.

Finally, if you're a soldier patrolling a conquered city, and you see someone seemingly unarmed running towards you, it could be a suicide bomber about to blow you up, or it could simply be someone running. You risk killing an innocent or you risk getting killed. On the other hand, if the patrol is robotic, it can simply wait; if the robot is blown up, no big deal, the factory has already built three new ones to replace it by the time the last pieces hit the ground, so you can err on the side of not shooting unless it's really obvious it's an enemy.

Robot infantry removes human emotions from the war, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Re:No worries

[Koby77]

I'm pretty confident that there will be more budgeting for this sort of thing in the future though. If you look at the costs of a military operation, it's huge. There's a lot of money which can be saved by switching to robots. Not so for other areas such as manufacturing. When you can move your manufacturing to a 3rd world country and have $2 per day workers, there isn't much money to be saved by introducing a robot into the process. Inevitably, the global military R&D budget will continue to eclipse all other robotics research spending. Unless some other unforeseen robotics application which can save boatloads of money is realized, I think it's just a matter of simple economics that the future control of robots will be by the military industry.

Electromagnetic Pulse, anyone?

[Kozz]

What kind of expense would be required to effectively shield these armies of robots from strong EMP? Or would an EMP be impractical or ineffective? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:Electromagnetic Pulse, anyone?

[Shihar]

If you are lobbing EMP weapons at each other, you are already fucked and fighting WW3. Duck and cover. Emp blasts have very small rangers. With the amount of effort it takes to make a pulse big enough to fry a robot, you might as well just drop a normal bomb on their head and do it the old fashion way. The only time this isn't true is if you start lobbing neutron bombs and nukes. Those are probably worth the price... but if you are lobbing around nukes, you are already completely fucked and fighting the kind of war where cities get vaporized and civilizations collapse.

For your run of the mill insurgent, I am pretty sure your best solution is the old fashion one... explosives.

"Friendly Evolution"

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's just it -- human nature never changes."

Of course it can. That's what evolution is for.

This isn't a hopeful future

[Whuffo]

There's lots of talk here about how machines are not as "good" as humans. That is certainly true on an overall basis - but for specific well defined tasks, a machine can outperform a human by an order of magnitude or more.

Recognize a human being by IR? No problem. Aim a weapon at the head? No problem. Bang, one shot and one kill. Repeat times N where N is the size of the machine's ammo supply or the number of targets (whichever is less). The whole cycle would take a fraction of a second and if you were one of the targets you'd probably be dead before you discovered your peril. The fact that such machines are well within our capability to mass produce right now isn't what scares me - it's the sad fact that there are people in high places that think that doing this would be a good idea.

There are unwritten rules to wars - the general concept is duke it out until one side or the other gives up or can't continue. This "agreement" would break down when the killbots started mowing down the enemy and things would get very ugly in a hurry. Do you think nukes are the "big scary?" Wait until you see what's coming if we head down this path.

Dystopia is coming

[TheTapani]

Another talk on the same topic. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html

Military robots are the future of war. We will see robot armies fighting each other. Consider what kind of surveillance state you can create by millions of robotic insects, using swarm intelligence / smart dust to report on everyone.

Maybe mankind ends up like in matrix, but with opposing robot armies trying to kill the last survivors from the superpowers, who are hiding deep down underground, kept alive by fading nuclear reactors...

Running spider mines

[DigiShaman]

Won't be long before we (any nation really) has robotic spider mines. Imagine them communicating with each other in pack and relaying GPS location data. If one finds a target, they start to zero in on the victim. Imagine being out in the field and seeing one of these bastards running along and then hopping on to your fellow soldier just prior to detonation.

Don't know about the rest of you, but "Oh fuck" would be the last thing going through my mind after seeing something like that.

What do they call this type of robot?

[CrazyJim1]

This robot is: A humanoid robot controlled entirely by the movements and actions of a live person. I know we don't have the technology for a robot to keep its balance well enough on two legs, but we are there or at least close for controlling a skeleton in 3d. What would a robot like this be called? I'm sure I'm not the first to think about it, so I figure there has to be a name for it.

I have doubts

[Rothron the Wise]

I suspect it will be too easy to create effective countermeasures to make military robots a real threat. After all since the robots are identical the same countermeasure will be effective for all of them. They will also have simple sensors which are easier to trick than human soldiers.

Re:I already bought my copy

[foobsr]

Deadly Image (The Uncertain Midnight) (1958)
A novel by Edmund Cooper

Quote: "He was an anachronism... He was a twentieth century man who, by a freak of chance, survived to see an age in which working had become a social disgrace; an age in which culture and the arts reigned supreme; an age of mannered ladies and gentlemen, perfectly waited on and cared for by androids - the man-like creations of their own genius. The higher grade androids were doctors, engineers, politicians and personal "companions" to each and every human being. And in whatever they did, they were perfect. No one had to worry about them. For the first time in history, man had completely freed himself from the problems of living: EXCEPT... When perfect machines, with perfect performance, are made to perfectly resemble man - who needs man?"

I called it SoftWar®

[starglider29a]

In a novel which I will never publish, I wrote of a scenario where simulations of wars are run to show the aggressors that they can't win. It grew from a fictitious video game with full body, tactile, feedback (painful) suit. I called it SoftWar®