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."

Comments

Asimov naive? I don't think so.

[bungo]

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.

Re:Asimov naive? I don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this Patrick Lin is a bit naive if he thinks that Asimov made the 3 rules as some kind of guideline for how to build robots.
The 3 rules were just a device to explore unintended consequences of these kinds of things.

Re:Asimov naive? I don't think so.

[TheLink]

I wonder if this anecdote is true (or based on a true incident involving Asimov):

While watching Clarke's 2001, it soon became obvious that Hal was going to
be a killer. Asimov complained to a friend, "They're violating the Three
Laws!"
His friend said, "Why don't you smite them with a thunderbolt?"

Re:Asimov naive? I don't think so.

[nine-times]

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.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I never thought the 3 rules were even the point. I didn't even think it was about robots per se. Asimov's interest seemed to me to be more directed at the difficulties with systematizing morality into a set of logical rules. Robots are a handy symbolic tool for systemizing human behavior in thought experiments or fiction.

I guess I could be reading too much into things, but really arguing about the 3 rules seems to me a bit like arguing about the proper arrangement of dilithium crystals in the Star Trek universe-- it may be fun or interesting for the sake of a discussion, but it's kind of not that important.

Asimov was not naive

[houghi]

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)

hmm

[buddyglass]

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?

Re:I don't think Asimov was naive

[TheLink]

Asimov would be naive if he actually believed the laws could actually be implemented.

I claim that any entity capable of understanding the Asimov Laws AND _interpreting_ them to apply them in complex and diverse scenarios would also be capable of choosing not to follow them.

You can program stuff to not shoot when some definable condition is met or not met. But when you need the AI to realize what is "human", "orders", "action/inaction" and "harm" (and judge relative harms), you're talking about a different thing completely.

You can train (and breed) humans and other animals to do what you want, but it's not like your orders are some non-negotiable mathematical law. Same will go for the really autonomous AIs. Anyone trying to get those to strictly follow some Law of Robotics is naive.

Even humans that intentionally try to will have difficulty following the 3 Laws. Through my inaction it is possible that some child in Africa will die, or perhaps not. How many would know or even care? FWIW most humans just do what everyone else around them is doing. Only a minority are good, and another minority are evil (yes good and evil are subjective but go look up milgram experiment and stanford prison experiment for what I mean - the good people are those who choose to not do evil even when under pressure).

Not all robots are autonomous agents

[Hentes]

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.

Did you know weapons can be TOO lethal?

[wisebabo]

(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".

Re:Did you know weapons can be TOO lethal?

[pla]

I thought the whole point of weapons was 100% lethality.

The ethics of killing aside, the "best" weapon for strategic (as opposed to personal self-defense) purposes doesn't kill, but rather, maximizes the resource drain required to deal with the damage. Ideally, a "perfect" weapon would leave your enemy's troops all alive, all severely crippled, and all not quite damaged enough to consider letting them die a mercy, yet requiring some fabulously expensive perpetual treatment.

Some of the greatest victories in human history came down to such trivial nuisances as dysentery or the flu.

Re:Death penalty

[fsckmnky]

I disagree.

What are the ethics of forcing the public to sustain the life of the handful of members of society who have proven by their own actions they don't value the lives of others ?

In your view, it's perfectly ethical to take money from grandma to feed a deranged serial killer indefinitely.

When you produce a 100% effective treatment for deranged serial killers, that will convert them into productive, or at least, harmless self-supporting members of society, then the death penalty will no longer be necessary.

Autonomy and background

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Ethics are relative

[nurb432]

And the standards are written by the victors.

Re:Asimov was not naive.

[Broolucks]

He starts from the assumption that strong safeguards are needed, because robots will be like humans and will try to circumvent them. In practice, robots will circumvent their imperatives about as much as humans commit suicide - at the very worst - because obviously we will set things up so that only obedient units ever get to transmit their "genes" to the next robot generation, so to speak. Making robots with human-like minds and then giving them rules, as Asimov seems to suggest, is a recipe for disaster regardless of the rules you give them. It's good literature, but we're not heading that way.

Ethics is hard

[Okian Warrior]

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.

When machines are fighting our wars...

[mark-t]

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.