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Philosopher Patrick Lin On the Ethics of Military Robotics
Runaway1956 writes "Last month, philosopher Patrick Lin delivered this briefing about the ethics of drones at an event hosted by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture-capital arm. It's a thorough and unnerving survey of what it might mean for the intelligence service to deploy different kinds of robots. This story is very definitely not like Asimov's robotic laws! As fine a mind as Isaac Asimov had, his Robot stories seem a bit naive, in view of where we are headed with robotics."
I don't at all think that Asimov was naive! I think he was concerned about what what robots could become and was trying to educate people about what was needed.
For example, look at the too narrow a definition of human or the weakening of the laws in other cases and the trouble they produced.
Isaac Asimov had, his Robot stories seem a bit naive
Are you sure you read the same Asimov Robot stories as everyone else? Asimov would set up his laws of robotics, and then go on to show how problems would occur by following those rules.
Remember when he added the 0th rule in one of his later books? Again is was because he was NOT naive and knew that the 3 rules were not enough.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
He also was not predicting anything. he wanted to tell stories and for that reason he invented the Robotics laws. The fact that we use it for something else is not his fault.
If adding or removing laws fitted his story telling, he would do so.
And they might seem naive, but who cares? They are stories, not predictions. And great stories at that. (Pity that they got raped in the movies)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
He knew exactly what humans could and would put robots to. That was the whole point of his laws to show that it didn't have to be that way, and that we could build robots with safe-guards built in. Even then he went to lengths to show that his laws were also not sufficient in every case to prevent harm.
I'm waiting for the first robots v/s robots war with both sides equally matched. That will affect the current research drastically.
The next step, of course would be to take these wars from the real world and restrict them to just the virtual world so there's no killing of homo sapiens ;-)
We are already seeing this happen and have been seeing it for hundreds of years... thousands even. The problem with people is that there are too many of them and that they often disagree with their leaders as to what is best for them. So when disagreements happen, there has to be a way to manage them. There are lots of ways... it's just that some would prefer there should be machines to go out and 'control' those who disagree. Getting other people to do your dirty work for you is often fraught with complications like conscience and morality.
Much would seem to hinge on whether you view drones as making independent "decisions", like a human does, or whether you view them as simply reacting to stimuli in a fairly predetermined way. In the former case they're autonomous agents. Maybe something that "new" that might causes us to think differently about the ethics of warfare. In the latter case they're just another man-made tool to maximize killing ability and minimizing risk. Other than that they have some (apparently pretty simplistic) AI baked in, from the perspective of "killing without risk to one's self or even having to experience the horrors of war", how are drones that different from cruise missiles?
If anything Asimov saw the potential for where we are going, and suggested an alternative.
Currently there are no true AI's out there, there is ALWAYS a human in the loop or human programming that kicks in when communications drops as in the current Iran vs US drone fiasco, with this in mind robots built by humans will always be limited by some form of human control and so any "ethics" involved will always be human not machine derived as a true AI might be able to do.
All humans have situational ethics.
Since I think everyone here reads the news and can see what people are capable of you can go ahead and be terrified by any robotics used against humans by humans, to give an analogy of how I see this playing out stabbing a man is personal, you're close, you get bloody, and you can feel him suffer, shooting a man not so personal and blowing a man up 2000 miles away, well there is nothing personal about it, it's about as close to detachment as you can get and based on the behavior I see in most first person shooters I would expect to see someone killing a group of people with a bot then speaking through the bot "u mad bro".
Regardless of whether the robots are used in ethical ways or not, it is guaranteed that most of the opposition to their use will be from groups who are just looking for a way to oppose either a specific war or all wars the US is involved in. The robots will be a hook for disingenuous anti-war or anti-US activism that would not actually end if the US stopped using robots.
Every single time the headlines read "US uses ___ for military purposes, ethicists are talking about it" this has always been what has happened.
And Stalin said: "As fine a mind as Karl Marx had, his ideas seem a bit naive, in view of where we are heading with communism."
Look, the US has the death penalty. This fact means that it doesn't even have a say on ethics.
Welcome back in a couple of hundred years when you realize a thing or two, then we can talk!
Military drones are not autonomous, but controlled by humans. Killing with drones is unethical the same way killing with a gun or with your bare hands is.
(From the article) So the Intl. Red Cross "bans weapons that cause more than 25% field mortality and 5% hospital mortality". (I assume these are the same guys who came up with the Geneva conventions so maybe there is some enforceability as in a war crimes trial afterwards).
Wow, and I thought all's fair (in love) and war. Doesn't this make every nuke illegal? (the article said this is one of the justifications for banning poison gas). So the concern is that as these drones get better, they may have a lethality approaching 100% making them illegal even if there are zero casualties from collateral damage.
I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality. I guess I never thought about how terrifying such a weapon would be (as if war wasn't terrifying enough). Weapons have gone a long way since the first club wielded by that ape-man in that documentary "2001".
The drones are remote-controlled devices and not different to "distance weapons" such as longbows or precision rifles. There has been a discussion hundreds of years ago whether such weaponry is morally OK or not and apparently the human race has decided they are permissible. Again, Drones are NOT robots, as they have 0% scope to decide about weapons engagement. There are always humans making the "kill" decision. It has ZERO to do with Asimov's reasoning.
Whether you think warfare in Afghanistan is good| achieving anything positive|legal is a wholly different question, though.
That's the key difference between Asimov's robots and ours, and the reason the Three Laws were needed.
Susan Calvin explained once that robots knew at some level that they were superior to humans, and that without the First Law, the first time a human gave a robot an order, the robot would kill out of resentment.
And the standards are written by the victors.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gak! How do I delete this comment? Please don't mod me down, delete it. My fingers slipped... Mixed up my troll account and my shiny new, I promise I will only do quality postings account. It should have read: The three laws of Robotics (Score:?) by Jason Z. Christie (2534180) on Sunday December 18, @10:59AM Can't exactly apply to killing machines. The whole thing is overcomplicated at that point, and we know where overcomplicated code is going to lead us. Skynet running on Windows Eleventy.
Zombie Killa, Free nerdcore hip-hop novella http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/119619
Vini: We have a lot of works to do. You shouldn't be waisting time reading stories on the computer. Waterproof heart and brain monitor?
Guido: It's a good story about ethical type stuff. Uh... check.
Vini: I'm just sayin. If the boss catches ya your screwed. Robotic dunking arm?
Guido: Uh... check. It aint like we gots the eyes or ears set up yet.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
If the engineers who develop these robotic weapons platforms weren't part of the military-industrial complex? Where would the US economy be if we didn't put our best and brightest to work at new weapons systems?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have a strong defense, but at what point do we say enough is enough? It seems to me the armed drones are of limited defensive value. They are an offensive weapon, at least in the way they are being used today.
Lots of geek types seem to take them as literal laws of robotics. I've seen people get all worked up because an autonomous military robot would "Violate the three laws of robotics." They liked the stories so much they decided that those laws are real.
Since they get bandied about like that all the time, I'm not surprised some journalist gets taken in by that.
When the US government stops killing innocent civilians, whether by "accident" or not, then I'll consider not automatically assuming that the US governement will kill innocent civilians.
You should get modded down for admitting to a troll account. _
They'd like to, but the Red Cross doesn't get to make those kind of determinations. That all comes from The SIrUS Project near as I can tell. The Red Cross thinks it would be a great idea, but it has no force of law or treaty that I can see.
The actual Geneva Convention rule is more along the lines of weapons that aren't lethal enough. You can't use weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering. For example you couldn't design a weapon that would, say, go in and destroy someone's liver but leave everything else intact so they die unnecessarily slowly and painfully.
There are also some specific prohibitions in terms of kinds of ammo used and so on, and bans on particular kinds of weapons, like gas.
But no, as far as I'm aware there's nothing saying you can't make weapons very, very lethal.
This is a subtle point with ethics, so I'm not surprised that you don't get it.
Killing is not unethical per se.
We kill people all the time and consider it ethical because of justifications behind the killing. Police can kill in the line of duty, soldiers can kill in duty of war, doctors can administer mercy killings to comatose patients, and so on.
Killing becomes unethical not because it is killing, but because it is unjust. When the killing goes outside of the bounds of what we consider justified and reasonable, then and only then does it become unethical.
Drone killings are not unethical in and of themselves, but using drones removes most of the social restraint we have against unethical killing. Unlike using a gun, no human "feels" the killing, there are no witnesses, and there is a diluted sense of responsibility.
This makes drones easier to use and as a result, they will be used frequently for unethical killings.
Which was the staple of the pulps of his day; to avoid that he created the 3 laws - which he WAS naive enough to hope might be constraints under which a civilised community required its robots to operate. Sadly we fall short of his hopes for human civilisation....
ED-209 anyone???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrXfh4hENKs
From TFA:
Robots can monitor vital signs of interrogated suspects, as well as a human doctor can. They could also administer injections and even inflict pain in a more controlled way, free from malice and prejudices
This is a terrible (human) atrocity.
This is humans renouncing their humanity, by trying to get as far as possible from the victims of their actions through robots and drones, thous avoiding the moral responsibility. Horror.
We lose touch with the real cost of war... and with the importance of what, in the end, might be attained by it.
In the end, I believe that the only things that justify going to war against another are things that one is prepared to sacrifice their life for so that future generations might be able have it. And in the end, our appreciation for whatever might be gained because of a past war is only amplified by the value of the sacrifice that went along with it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Looks at this, the short story is at least in "Engineering Inifinity".
"Malak is a story of semi-sentient, semi-autonomous robot war plane bomber machines, one named Azrael in particular. Azrael is a conflicted robot as human overrides break its rule-based world view consistently. Azrael follows every order it is given, but it still has microseconds of doubt." - http://adamcallaway.blogspot.com/2011/01/ssr-sf-malak-by-peter-watts-engineering.html
The human overrides in this case are forcing an attack when the drones internal cost/benefit calculations lead to it aborting, usually due to too high projected collatelar damage.
I liked the story.
Surprised in an article that long, this wasn't mentioned:
The ability to wage war without the morality of individual soldiers. While soldiers are certainly capable of immoral actions like raping and indiscriminate slaughter that a machine not, it is also that humanity that can lead them not to follow orders, stop fighting...
Today, this is probably much more important in domestic issues. Imagine the recent Arab Spring if the Arab dictators had access to such robots. They could effectively control their population indiscriminately.
The Egyptian military is still composed of regular Egyptians. They follow orders and get paid, but at the end of the day they are regular people; family, neighbors... Mubarak couldn't just tell them to slaughter Egyptians on mass.
Imagine a psychopath like Hitler in charge of such an army. Not having to care about defections, unwilling troops...
The ability to command a powerful army in the hands of so few is what is truly scary.
Artificial Intelligence does not exist. As of now, nothing except humans can pass the Turing test.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
bad article.
I think Fred Saberhagen wrote the books about where we are headed, not ACC.
http://www.berserker.com/FredsBerserkers.html
Skynet was an amateur compared to these guys. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
asimov wasn't naive, he just wasn't a murderous sociopath like our protectors in the cia and the military
While robots can be seen as replacements for humans, in most situations, humans will still be in the loop, or at least on the loop--either in significant control of the robot, or able to veto a robot's course of action. And robots will likely be interacting with humans. This points to a possible weak link in applications: the human factor.
Which will be addressed by SkyNet.
Have gnu, will travel.
((As fine a mind as Isaac Asimov had, his Robot stories seem a bit naive, in view of where we are headed with robotics.))
Asimov was describing artificial intelligence, not remote controlled weapons. In Asimov's stories, US Robotics had to raise robot intelligences like infants- they come into the world knowing nothing, and have to be taught and trained.
A drone is just a really big RC airplane. Anything it does is either guided by a human, or it's running a non-intelligent program (subject to GPS spoofing, it seems).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
How can a system be ethical however it is programmed if it mostly ignores that issue? Granted, we may well need smart security robots. But they might be designed and used differently if we understood that fundamental issues.
Banking problems are another aspect of why we are creating military robots, given the Muslims have repudiated the US banking system, and this is part of the whole conflict. Here is an insightful essay by Richard C. Cook ( http://www.richardccook.com/ ) about a "national dividend" (or a "basic income") from April 2007 (!) called:
"An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5494
A related six-part video series:
"Credit As A Public Utility"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Simon Ramo doesn't appear to have any problem with the use of military robots from the title of his new book, "Let Robots do the Dying" (The Coming Partnership of Men and Robots in the US Military) ...
http://www.amazon.com/Let-Robots-Dying-Simon-Ramo/dp/193280093X/ref=sr_1_36?ie=UTF8&qid=1324241286&sr=8-36
The headline talks about military robots, but in his introduction Mr. Lin talks about torture. Torture is unethical. And it stays unethical when it is performed by a machine. The only difference is, that not a person is actually performing it. But the issue remains, the victim is still a victim, and the person ordering the torture is still a scumbag. Similar logic applies to any machinery which is used to spy on people or bomb them. It makes no difference if the machine is more automated or not. A human pulls the trigger either by ordering the machine to do so or by pushing a button. As the machine has no moral standards, as it is a tool and not a being, all evil which the machine has to do is done by the one instructing it. And yes when you help someone to built such an elaborate tool, you are guilty too. On an ethic level that is.
Currently, the Azimov Laws of Robotics come off as rather naive. That's because we're just getting started, and the utility of said Laws aren't generally recognized. They won't be until we've been hoist on our own petard a few times, including the power elite. Only when a large and broad enough sample of people have been killed, without a sustained advantage accruing to any one nation, will Azimov be seen as prophetic.
Luke, help me take this mask off
That should fix it.
If you're working on a general purpose algorithm to (say, recent news) improve the efficiency of multiplication of large sparse matrices, which will have multiple non-murderous uses, then you're probably going to be able to talk your way off the gallows by pointing to how widely your application is used outside the kill-bot industry.
OTOH, your script for tracking moving humanoid targets and calculating whether it's better in a fiscal (and re-supply logistics) sense to use the machine gun or the napalm torch ... isn't likely to get much use outside kill-bots and gaming.
Oh dear - I wonder ... if there are any games out there with user-scripted 'bots' that perform various militarily interesting things ... could the TLA agencies be using them as a front for testing such algorithms? "Could" is a bit obvious there : a programming "Rule 34" ; "Do" might be a better question.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"