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UN to Debate Use of Fully Autonomous Weapons, New Report Released
concertina226 (2447056) writes "The United Nations will debate the use of killer robots for the first time at the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) this week, but human rights activists are calling for the robots to be banned. Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic have published a new report entitled 'Shaking the Foundations: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots', which calls for killer robots to be banned to prevent a potential arms race between countries. Killer robots, or fully autonomous weapons, do not yet exist but would be the next step after remote-controlled armed drones used by the US military today. Fully autonomous weapons would have the ability to identify and fire on targets without human intervention, putting compliance with international humanitarian laws in doubt. Among the problems with killer robots highlighted in the report is the risk of criminal liability for a military officer, programmer or weapons manufacturer who created or used an autonomous weapon with intent to kill. If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable."
Like humans killing by remote is better. Michael Hayden: "We kill people based on metadata".
Don't mines qualify as "autonomous weapons"?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Bans will not only not prevent them being developed, probably even by a technologically advanced State that is a signatory to the treaty, but it will also not prevent them being used by rogue or puppet states who don't care about bans, or who use them at the behest of a signatory state that is just using them to do their dirty work.
c development!"
When I read things like this I wonder how these people even function in daily life without eating pebbles and glue sandwiches. The fact that the law is not currently equipped to assign guilt in the case of the malfunction of an autonomous robot is not a good enough incentive to stop scientific progress. First of all, robots can't kill arbitrarily, they can only kill who their programming specifies they should kill, even if that programming encounters a bug or operates in a manner unforeseen by its programmers. Arbitrarily would be without reference to a standard, randomly, like an earthquake or lightning. Second, banning killer robots will not prevent an arms race. It will simply hamper the combat effectiveness of the side who holds itself to the treaty. Third, it would be much more effective if the money spent on ethicists worrying about how scary science is to them went to the scientists instead, so that it could go into development and research of the very thing the ethicists are so afraid of, to make it better understood and less scary.
Since it has to kill enemies, they have already deleted the 3 laws. The robot has firewall to any outside control and runs on nuclear power, requiring no recharging. What could possibly go wrong?
Auto-targeting weapons are only a matter of time. If a college student can make a gun that spits out paintballs with high accuracy, then the best and brightest likely have items far superior.
Yes, the UN will debate it, but it will be like the debate on land mines. A lot of hand wringing, but nothing really getting done, and the belligerent parties will still make them.
Right now, it is only a matter of perfecting manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised to see in 5-10 years that sentry robots, which shoot at anything that doesn't have some form of friendly transponder, will become the norm on not any military post, be it Russian, Chinese, Saudi Arabian, or any other place that needs area denial.
Lets be real here... a couple independently active robots with high RPM machine guns are a lot more reliable than soldiers/guards, have no moral issues, have no morale issues, and will "just work". Someone takes one out with a rocket, another can easily return fire.
Add sentry UACVs to the mix, and a rocket attack would be responded in kind.
I wouldn't be surprised to see even civilian warehouses (a data center in a rural area) protected by autonomous firing machines soon. Might makes right, and SCOTUS has shown that money is speech, so any casualties from these would have no criminal/civil consequences ("there was a warning sign".) I would also not be surprised to see this on train tracks and other places, where there isn't a need for it, but the fear of being gunned down by a robot will keep kids from putting pennies on tracks.
Look how tasers are overused. Expect the same thing with these.
This is a pointless debate, the US sits on the security council and will veto any resolution against the use of their new, yet to be developed, toys.
Didn't they ever watch that documentary starring John Conner and Sarah Conner?
then this is a solved problem.
You're right. Clearly having any regulation of war whatsoever is foolish because "rogue" states will not abide by them anyway.
Now explain the holocaust, please.
The fact that the law is not currently equipped to assign guilt in the case of the malfunction of an autonomous robot
But it is. In the case where an autonomous industrial robot kills someone it is possible to assign guilt. In those cases the paper trail is followed until a step can be found where the safety standards for industrial robots where violated. The blame will be put on the developer that didn't take necessary safety precautions. If no such flaw can be found the guilt is put on the person that disconnected or sidestepped the safety critical components. (Most of the time, but not always, this is the person that got hurt.)
Those standards naturally doesn't apply to weapons that were designed to kill people.
I don't know how robot soldiers identify targets, but presuming they have some mechanism whereby they only kill armed combatants it's not hard to see some advantages over human soldiers at least with respect to civilian noncombatants.
More accurate fire -- ability to use the minimal firepower to engage a target due to superior capabilities. Fire back only when fired upon -- presumably robots would be able to withstand some small arms fire and thus wouldn't necessarily need to shoot first and wouldn't shoot civilians.
Emotionally detached -- they wouldn't get upset when Unit #266478 is disabled by sniper fire from a village and decide to kill the villagers and burn the village. You don't see robots engaging in a My Lai-type massacre.
They also wouldn't commit atrocities against civilians, wonton destruction, killing livestock, rape, beatings, etc. Robots won't rape and pillage.
I hate to be the pessimistic voice of reality here but terrorists and bad governments like N Korea and Syria would use them if they had them. They would use nuclear weapons, radiation bombs, chemical warfare, etc if they had them. Some already have. So hit them with robots now. This is the same stupidity as putting up a sign outside a theater that says no guns allowed inside. What's the result? Criminals and crazy people carry guns in and regular people don't have them. My point is, a ban will do nothing to people who won't follow the rules anyway.
"......If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable."
That is the golden goose...
The difficulties are only in people's minds -- especially those who seek justification to push projects. If someone deploys a weapon, they are responsible for all foreseeable consequences. Whether that weapon is a slug of dumb lead, smart missile or robot.
Even if the weaponeer did not intend the effects they are still responsible, perhaps as manslaughter rather than murder. The capabilities and risks are hardly concealed. OTOH, if they were careless nor negligent, then their responsibility increases. Nothing new here, just salesmen trying to assuage and belay responsibility of the buyers.
I expect this will be as successful as the UN's 1990-era anti-mine treaty (the Ottawa Treaty - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...), with over a hundred signatories, but not Russia, China or the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
wonton destruction
Leave my dumplings alone!
c development!"
When I read things like this I wonder how these people even function in daily life without eating pebbles and glue sandwiches. The fact that the law is not currently equipped to assign guilt in the case of the malfunction of an autonomous robot is not a good enough incentive to stop scientific progress.
Well, I'm glad there's at least one of us here who thinks designing something for a singular purpose (killing) is somehow scientific "progress". Who would want to miss out on the next atom bomb, or anthrax. After all, we've had so many things to be proud of in this area of "advancement" as a race.
First of all, robots can't kill arbitrarily, they can only kill who their programming specifies they should kill, even if that programming encounters a bug or operates in a manner unforeseen by its programmers.
Speaking of arbitrary, ever heard of AI? Yeah, I guarantee those who are building these fucking things have.
And I love how you dismiss a "bug" here as if lives didn't just end as a result of said bug. These are robots designed for a single purpose. When they fuck up, it's kind of huge. I'm fearful stepping into a car with seatbelts and air bags under automated control for fear of bugs, and you dismiss bugs in a killing machine as "oh well, Patch Tuesday is soon."
I'm not sure what is scarier, the research itself, or mentalities like yours.
Let states develop and use them, and make it legally binding that the responsibility for deploying them and for anything they do is the personal legal responsibility of the head of government, and with no 'sovereign immunity' get-outs.
Taking such action really is a bad idea. An autonomous killing machine could be as complicated as as a military drone with hellfire missiles or as simple as a car loaded with autonomous weapons designed to engage any anything that move, with a GPS pre-determined route and self-driving capability, sitting like a mobile minefield in an abandoned house long after the occupants have left, waiting to be activated.
I think the appropriate course of action would be to feed international condemnation of such tactics until they are treated with ruthlessness by the international community against any involved in use of such weapons, for any infraction. Just like the use of chemical weapons should have been...
Autonomous weapons are far more frightening that WMDs... And nowhere is safe.
Then again, I wrote a book on the creation of a universal standard for determining if an autonomous weapon could be trusted with the decision to kill, so perhaps I am somewhat hypocritical there.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
You don't see robots engaging in a My Lai-type massacre.
They also wouldn't commit atrocities against civilians, wonton destruction, killing livestock, rape, beatings, etc. Robots won't rape and pillage.
Of course they wouldn't, why would you release the whole feature set at once?! What kind of long term value are you giving to shareholders? V1 identifies targets and shoots, the 1.5 upgrade (which is really a bufix) is free to certain level customers but a small (50% of entire robot price) to everyone else. V2 will commit SOME atrocities, but there will be atrocity incompatibility with other models. No upgrade, just have to buy new. Robot Infinity (break away from model numbers for marketing, even though firmware says V3 all over the non-secure telnet command prompt with default password of 0000) will have coordinated atrocity mode (so it can work with drones and other automated craft to just atrocitize EVERYTHING! ALL NEW VERSION!!!) Finally, livestock killing (enemy supply elimination mode) and beatings (enemy non-lethal submission) and rape (enemy supporter kinetic repetition mode) all come after Robot version Infinity^2 fails and they hurry up and rush windows 7 errr Robot 7 out the door that finally does everything that previous robot versions have been promised they will do for years. Don't even get me started on Robot Server: "Robot Server makes administrating robots easy by making everything point and click GUI and no more scripts and command lines! That's why we're better than Robot *nix and competitor x!" Robot Server 2008+ "GUI is dumb, command shell robot administrating is the way to go! Scripts where one command updates a 2000 robots! No more selecting and clicking! No more security support for Robot XP, if those go off killing people from lack of security updates, hey, you should have upgraded, even if your robot did all the raping and pillaging you needed."
The scientific progress lies in the identification of targets for energy transfer. That they can or will be used to kill people is completely irrelevant because pretty much every scientific advancement of the last hundred years can be used to kill people, whether that means flying a plane into a skyscraper or dying from chemo therapy and radiation before the cancer kills you.
AFAIK any mandate wouldn't restrict the development of these weapons, just the deployment. It's not like the complete irrelevance of a technology in a battlefield setting ever stopped DARPA before.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Homing missiles are fired by a person. We are talking about machines here which can have only a vague order like "protect this facility" or "advance to this point" and during the execution of these commands they can identify encountered people as hostile based on some criterias and can "decide" to eliminate them. That does not even come close to a homing missile.
In a ground combat scenario, autonomous weapons could be a good thing. Right now, soldiers are tasked with protect others as well as themselves, and in most situations the safest resolution is to kill the antagonist. A machine or robot wouldn't suffer from emotional lapses in judgment (anger, hostility). A robot may have better weapons skills, so instead of a kill shot, may only need to wound. A robot would be more willing to put itself in harms way to protect a living person.
The programming required for such a machine would be incredibly complex, but controllable with defined precision. A human soldier can't be controlled or programmed, and history shows that humans make a lot of bad decisions when it comes to the use of deadly force.
They are like Unsullied?
The scientific progress lies in the identification of targets for energy transfer. That they can or will be used to kill people is completely irrelevant because pretty much every scientific advancement of the last hundred years can be used to kill people, whether that means flying a plane into a skyscraper or dying from chemo therapy and radiation before the cancer kills you.
Don't forget, "or taking Cialis and dying from (complications due to) a 6 hour erection."
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
...as with most technological weapon issues, those with them, or with a reasonable chance of developing them will defend the idea.
Those without will roundly condemn it using a great deal of moral and ethical language, but their base issue is that they cheerfully condemn the use of any weapons that they cannot yet field.
The UN as a clearinghouse organization for multinational efforts does a massive amount of good that would otherwise be difficult to enable. ... for reasons based entirely on their OWN narrow self-interests. (Not to mention its main actual value: a way for the favored scions of grubby tinpot regimes to be prostitute-frequenting scofflaws in a place far nicer than their own pestilential capitals.)
The UN's general chambers are worthless talking shops where inconsequential states get to criticize significant, powerful states for acting in their own narrow self-interest
-Styopa
Uh...what?
I'm pretty sure everything DARPA works on has huge battlefield relevance. It's not like cold-fusion powered tanks wouldn't be a huge game-changer.
Now if you were a kamikaze pilot and everybody was sleeping on the job and you went for a final dive against a modern battleship or aircraft carrier, wouldn't you already be blased to bits by an autonomous defense system? I imagine the same goes for tanks, planes, helicopters and even indivdual robot-soldiers, you'll never wait until you're blasted to bits to say "yup, that was an enemy". Even if they don't go on their own search & destroy missions I doubt they'll avoid being used as sentries, convoy escort and other defensive purposes. Or even "defensive on the offensive" weapons like if you point an RPG at a tank. Not to mention self-defense backups if the communication to the mothership is jammed, nobody will leave high tech military equipment stranded and defenseless by a simple communcations jammer. Not going to happen.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Poison gas kills without human intervention too
They also wouldn't commit atrocities against civilians, wonton destruction, killing livestock, rape, beatings, etc. Robots won't rape and pillage.
Why not? Conflict throughout history has always used all of the above as weapons of war. If a robot is given the ability and programming to, it'll do all of the above. And an advanced AI could well decide they help towards its goals of winning a war, either through spreading terror among the enemy or destroying their food supply.
Do they come with Lotus Notes and a machine gun?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
more difficult to hold anyone responsible than it is now, when drone operators arbitrarily murder civilians based on flawed intelligence, via signature threat (oh, there's a couple people with guns, let's blow them up!) on the way to a target based on flawed intelligence, or just plain negligence on the part of the operator? How about firing on wounded civilians being evacuated? War crimes? Please. Amerika is so above reproach... Don't make me put you on a terrorist watch list and detain you indefinitely while I waterboard the truth out of you.
The Super Aegis II has a 12.7 mm machine gun and a grenade launcher. laser and infrared sensors that see 3 km in the day, 2 at night. But the gun probably can't shoot that far - it just sees that far.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Beyond that, I see another problem with the idea of banning development of autonomous weapons: most of the technology involved would probably be developed anyway because it would be widely applicable.
Think about it. If you were going to make a killer robotic soldier, what technology would be hard to develop? It's difficult to make a robot that can easily traverse diverse terrain, but we'll work on that for other reasons. Making an AI that can accurately identify people by facial features, clothing, and speech patterns would be hard. We'd also do that for other reasons. There are a million reasons to develop and intelligent free-roaming robot who can identify people and interact with them.
Once you have a robot that can do those kinds of things, turning the "interaction" into "fire a weapon at that person" is easy. It's not hard for a computer to aim once it has its target. It's not hard for a computer to trigger the weapon itself.
Killer robots, or fully autonomous weapons, do not yet exist but would be the next step after remote-controlled armed drones used by the US military today.
Weapons contractors make their living imagining new weapons, sharing their visions with the public, then advocating that the US Military develop those weapons to avoid "the enemy" from making them first. Then once the weapon is invented, new weapons need to be created to defend against the weapon that already exists. Wash, rinse, repeat.
And people wonder why so much money is spent on defense spending.
We need all of this why? Wanting Weapons and Wars just shows how non-advanced and uncivilized Humans are and how we haven't even moved out of our caves yet.
If we are to survive well into the future, we need to learn to disregard our primitive ways and start thinking about others instead of only ourselves. The whole idea of separate Countries and separate people disgust me deeply. People, we are not separate, we all live on a tiny Blue Planet in the middle of an unexplored ocean of awesomeness. If we can't rid ourselves of our primitive nature, maybe we are long overdue for extinction.
People condemn autonomous killing robots because they might screw up and kill something that shouldn't be killed.
How is this any different from what humans in charge of deciding who to kill do? (exhibit A: the Iraq war)
I'm outraged that anyone is even considering building soldiers that have no intrinsic sense of self-preservation, adrenaline, aggression, revenge. Imagine a soldier that would allow itself to be destroyed rather than fire when ordered not to, eg if there would be civilian casualties or if the target is not definitively identified. Obviously that sort of thing can't be allowed, because if we don't kill innocent bystanders how can we spawn new enemies to fight? Sadly, I suspect that robot soldiers won't actually be built with the goal of avoiding human faults.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
> it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.
Whoever built the hardware, and programmed the software would be accountable.
In shootings we hold the shooter responsible because it was a human who committed the crime. Since there is no human on the end, we can simply go back up the "chain" to find the people who ARE responsible.
This isn't rocket science.
That was the planned crime-against-humanity that was considered by the Nazis, but then right before they did it, one of Hitler's lawyers said, "Hey wait. According to this, the proposed action will be against the law." Since Hitler was top dog, he realized that he would have to prosecute himself, and that opened up such terrifying vistas of self-reference and paradox, that he was totally horrified. So he hastily abandoned the plan. Unfortunately, the memo cancelling the operation had typoes in the return address ("hitlOR" at "naTzi" dot gov), and the receiving servers (upon checking SPF and DKIM (I can't remember which)) thought it was spam, so it got filtered, so lots of innocent people got killed anyway. But that was a failure of anti-spam tech, not a failure to try to abide by law.
Think about the size of an army that China can deploy. We have zero ability to even dream of a one on one combat situation with a traditional Chinese army. Fielding mechanical warriors of various types would be our real hope other than using nuclear bombs are other weapons of mass destruction. Or the US could put two million soldiers on the line and watch them be swarmed over as a trivially, small force. Then there is the problem of cost. And it is not just for the full military responses. An effective border control is an economic back breaker. We could easily put automated devices on our border with Mexico which would shout out a freeze until a custodial officer arrives and if movement continues simply execute the target. We could make it next to impossible to violate our border and save millions in patrol costs continually. The same could be done at sea to protect restricted waters from foreign exploitation by whaling or fishing vessels. And then there is the drive by shooter issue so common in parts of California. Imagine punks firing into a home when suddenly a robotic warrior pops up with a very good weapon blazing at the offenders car. I know, all you who whine about guns, I repeat the problem is only that the wrong people are getting shot. Anything that gets the right people shot is a blessing.
Human beings need to understand themselves better; the machines will only be as good as their creators. We have no right and absolutely no need to build killer robots at this time. This further disconnects people from the reality of life and death.
You don't see robots engaging in a My Lai-type massacre.
They also wouldn't commit atrocities against civilians, wonton destruction, killing livestock, rape, beatings, etc. Robots won't rape and pillage.
Well... You won't see them independently decide to do something like that. But orders are literally orders to a robot. You tell them to burn a city to the ground, shoot anyone who tries to flee, and they will burn that city to the ground and shoot everyone who flees. Without remorse, without second guessing orders, without a moment of any hesitation.
Which frankly, worries me a bit more. Because the upper levels of command in just about every model of human hierarchy always seems to have worrying numbers of psychopaths/sociopaths beyond what you'd expect in a normal pool of the population. On top of that - they're physically removed from the carnage. It's a lot easier to order the leveling of a rebel-occupied village when you will never personally see the slaughter of innocents that result.
That's not to say humans never do these things. Just that, humans are capable of refusing to do these things. Robots aren't.
Well, for the specific case of rape, its hard to see what would be politically gained by a society advanced enough to deploy these. I view some atrocities as a by product of turning real humans into killers in a war setting.
The discussion is about fully autonomous devices. It makes no sense to program an autonomous device to project power as sexual violence instead of just violence.
Now, if we're talking about remote controlled machines..i fear we replace one kind of dynamic with another. We protect women from sexual violence from predatory men who are in theater, but introduce to the problem invincible machines being remotely controlled by guys who shoot the prostitutes in grand theft auto.
Almost nothing could be worse than to let humans control these machines remotely with live audio/video feeds. If that happens, You WILL see women stripping for the machines like cam girls, under threat, in fear....before being killed anyway after the operator has caused enough humiliation and anguish.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The are called CWIS aka r2d2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
I would rather have an autonomous lawn mower for less than $1k than cylons.
Its not the ones that shoot the prostitutes you need to worry about, Its the ones that use bats.
If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.
Not like now, when every time that an Afghan peasant is killed in error, heads roll.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Automated weapons are already deployed - the Korean DMZ is guarded, in part, by autonomous sentry drones. If it moves, they shoot it - and they're armed with machine guns or automatic grenade launchers.
That's a good model. Don't try to make a drone that can distinguish targets from non-targets - make something that treats everything as a target, and deploy it only when you don't have non-targets to worry about. Or, to allow your own forces to operate in the area, provide an IFF transmitter to designate them as non-targets (civilians are still fucked though - so don't use it anywhere near civilians). Works fine for air, land and sea - we already have an established concept of "shoot to kill zones", this just replaces the soldiers under orders to shoot anything that moves with robots under programming to shoot anything that moves.
For automated weapons deployed outside such areas (or even ones within), I would say that a human still has to give the fire order. The automated system can identify targets, track them, pursue them, prioritize targets, do basically everything but pull the trigger, but it has to request permission to fire from a human operator. And for all legal and ethical purposes, that human operator can be considered the one who pulled the trigger. It's still some massive force multiplication even compared to modern drones, so I don't see why the military would have much problem with it.
Let's wait until after we get true AI before we try to give machines the responsibility to decide whether or not to kill someone.
Let's make war as gentle and kind as possible!
No, perhaps war should be brutal and painful, and fewer people would be so willing to hop-skip into countries to free them.
If a robot killed arbitrarily, it would be difficult to hold anyone accountable.
Whereas currently there is no indiscriminate killing with drones going on without any accountability whatsoever? What's the current body count for innocent civilians murdered by the US and its allies in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc.? A few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands?
I doubt it would make much difference in practice...
What problem are these robots meant to solve? If we're determined to resolve disputes with violence, then whenever there is a dispute, put the two leaders in a boxing ring and let them fight it out. That will save us the lives of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of civilians, and billions of dollars.
You have 20 seconds to comply.
Better to have robots fight than people. Also once we have a lot of machine control APIs it won't be hard to make killer robots. I can make a paintball gun that shoots everyone but myself using a computer, a couple of high powered servos, a linear actuator, two cameras, and IBM's machine vision API. The fundamental technology just needs to be repurposed, so you're never going to stop the threat of killer machines.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
At what point will we all admit that the UN is an experiment, with results that indicate the need to stop pumping cash into this failed debating body? Can anyone site a single, positive accomplishment for which the UN was/is responsible? Not really. Even if you want to point to the "climate change studies".... that was simply a compendium of other peoples (flawed) work on the subject. Is it time to admit that the UN is useless? Iran on the human rights council? Seriously?
What if the atrocity was commanded? Soldiers are expected to be able to refuse an obviously immoral order. Non-sentient robots would not have that ability since they would be programmed to follow orders. I assert that "My Lai-type" stuff is exceedingly rare compared to immoral behavior ordered by commanders. Commanders don't see the immediate graphic result of their commands.
Good point. The drone war is bordering on what amounts to tele-genocide and nobody gives a shit. But the US isn't alone, nobody gives a shit about Syria's war crimes or NK's human rights violations either.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sure they won't. Until either there's a bug in the programming, or unintended consequences of multiple goals.
Why fully autonomous robots should disallowed on the battlefield - we don't have the Avengers assembled yet.
Someone completely skipped the day in school where they went over how the rational actor model works. Luckily, it tends to hold up pretty well in day to day life.
TL;DR your scenario is ridiculously contrived and implausible.
The point is that massacres like Mai Lai are caused when soldiers go a bit nutty due to the emotional stress of seeing their friends cut down by an insurgent resistance. That stress isnt going to be there if you're a remote operator, and youre generally going to be much better supervised by pencil-pushers as a drone operator than as an infantryman in a hostile country.
Just that, humans are capable of refusing to do these things. Robots aren't.
And as history shows us, humans dont. Forget about the holocaust, the cultural revolution, the soviet purges? Humans go with the crowd, especially in emotionally charged situations. Anything that brings down the emotion and brings some sanity to combat situations is a good thing.
a good portion of the population is starving. our planet chokes under endless waste while the people in charge focus on killer robots. when i have a lot of things to do i make a list and prioritize.
It is what it is.
Generally its easier to audit who was using a computerized drone control system than it is to figure out what, exactly, happened in the front lines of a war zone. I say "generally", which is to say "always".
"It would be great to get the US to give up making land mines, but unfortunately China and Russia would almost certainly ramp up production to fill any shortfall. That's not a good enough reason for us to keep doing it"
how about, we keep making/using them because they work? they are a very effective, low cost solution that saves the lives of those using them.
i love land mines. much better then throwing soldiers at the problem.
Why is this even up for debate? It's crazy talk. Machines should NEVER be allowed to make a life or death decision--period. Target selection should only be in the hands of humans. This way we have someone to take to Nuremberg afterwards.
most of the technology involved would probably be developed anyway because it would be widely applicable.
Furthermore, most of the tech has already been developed. It just hasn't been packaged conveniently (yet.) This has been the case for some years now, and the only thing that's surprising is that no one has deployed this kind of thing for domestic purposes, which is to say: assassination.
There are two canonical limits on assassination as a means of political expression: retaliation and the death of the assassin. Retaliation (if you assassinate our leader we'll assassinate yours) doesn't apply to terrorist groups, but presumably the ability of suicide bombers to get close to political leaders is poor enough that for the most part we see them being deployed against soft targets. That is, there are crazy people willing to blow themselves up to kill innocents, but not very many crazy people willing to bet on long odds to kill political leaders. The average political assassin will die (or get caught) without killing their victim, and apparently even nutjobs don't think that's a good trade-off.
Killer robots change all that. The ability to build a fully autonomous cruise missile has been around for years now, up to and including the terminal phase guidance system. It's actually really weird that no one has done it yet... Donald Kingsbury was writing about the possibility back in the '80's, and things have only got worse since.
As to the "problem" of accountability: to the average person in charge of killing people, that sounds like a feature, not a bug. It's hard enough to hold humans accountable for their actions. When its a machine, you can just scrub the logs, scrap the device, and claim that an unpredictable hardware failure resulted in the peaceful protestors being gunned down.
Killer robots, like machines that kill generally, are a stupid idea, and engineers who work on them should be ashamed of themselves. Killing is almost always the worst possible solution to any problem, and investing in killing machines is a lousy way to spend time and money if you're interested in making the world a better place by any reasonable standard.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The decision makers are accountable. That includes the legislatures and President. They are to be helad directly responsible for any actions these "terminators" take.
No excuses!
As soon as one kills an American on American soil, then the family and friends of the victim are justified in retaliation against those decision makers.
Good point. The drone war is bordering on what amounts to tele-genocide and nobody gives a shit. But the US isn't alone, nobody gives a shit about Syria's war crimes or NK's human rights violations either.
Tele-genocide? Seriously? I'm concerned about U.S. abuse of drones, but what racial, ethnic, religious or national group is being systematically destroyed? "Genocide" has a specific meaning, back off on the hyperbole.
No I've thought about this and discussed it with others before. If you count the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region as a national group...it is at least a regional group...what does that look like?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd imagine that nobody has come up with an assassination robot because of the need for stealth. It'd be hard enough to have a robot target a specific individual, but to do it without alerting anyone ahead of time would be much trickier. I would think that poison or a bomb would be easier.
Now if you're talking about a cruise missile, then I'm not sure what's gained by having it be completely autonomous. You may as well have someone sitting in a bunker someplace selecting the target and deciding whether to fire it, and then having appropriate computerized guidance.
You forget, politics is run by lawyers, and lawyers think that passing a law (or in this case a treaty) will magically fix everything. My dad, a remodeler, actually had a lawyer tell him that almost all the houses destroyed by hurricanes and tornadoes could be saveed if the law required that houses be built with hurricane clips on the roof trusses. For a lot of these bozos the law is their religion, which is one of the reasons why groups like the Innocence Project run into so much obstructionism.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
2004: Why is that website URL at the top of Google for that keyword? Answer: "The algorithm"
2019: Why did that fully autonomous weapon kill that person? Answer: "The algorithm"
The point is that massacres like Mai Lai are caused when soldiers go a bit nutty due to the emotional stress of seeing their friends cut down by an insurgent resistance.
The point wasn't about Mai Lai type disasters. It was about the guys at the top saying the bad guys have weapons of mass destruction, send in the terminators and kill em all.
I don't know if that's really the case. Apparently drone pilots are experiencing PTSD. It seems like the disconnect between 9-5 warfare and evening and weekend civilian life makes it even harder for them to cope.
I don't know if that has any impact on the risk of someone attacking civilians, but it seems that the stress is still there, even when the soldiers aren't (physically).
I'd imagine that nobody has come up with an assassination robot because of the need for stealth.
Sounds like a job for a mosquito-sized drone carrying a microsyringe holding a severe biotoxin.
that laws do not always prevent people from breaking them. However, without the law (or let's say "agreed upon norm") in place, it is impossible for others to say "hey, you aren't supposed to do that," which then makes reprisals tough to justify. We can all point our fingers at North Korea for example and call them crazy because we've agreed that you are not supposed to starve your people for instance. So, while those treaties may be imperfect, they do help to provide a framework within which we as a civilization can operate. Besides, what does it hurt to have them?
Watchbird will protect you.
Watchbird knows no borders, no limits.
Watchbird learns to protect you better.
Read Sheckley and weep.
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This Time It's Different! Every time is different, right? Isn't that what they always tell us??