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Only Twice Have Nations Banned a Weapon Before It Was Used; They May Do It Again
Lasrick writes: Seth Baum reports on international efforts to ban 'killer robots' before they are used. China, Israel, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are apparently developing precursor technology. "Fully autonomous weapons are not unambiguously bad. They can reduce burdens on soldiers. Already, military robots are saving many service members' lives, for example by neutralizing improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq. The more capabilities military robots have, the more they can keep soldiers from harm. They may also be able to complete missions that soldiers and non-autonomous weapons cannot." But Baum, who founded the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, goes on to outline the potential downsides, and there are quite a few.
To welcome our new Killer Robot overlords.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
When you are able to keep hackers from defacing your national websites.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"In 1868, the Great Powers agreed under the Saint Petersburg Declaration to ban exploding bullets, which by spreading metal fragments inside a victim’s body could cause more suffering than the regular kind. And the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons now has 104 signatories, who have agreed to ban the weapons on the grounds that they could cause excessive suffering to soldiers in the form of permanent blindness."
Enjoy :)
That makes the killing more humane :-/
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...You have 20 seconds to comply.
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
1868, the Great Powers agreed under the Saint Petersburg Declaration to ban exploding bullets, which by spreading metal fragments inside a victimâ(TM)s body could cause more suffering than the regular kind
Anyone herd of shrapnel? frag granades ? anti personnel mines ( which are now a days killing kids ) the most strange part is this sentence "could cause more suffering than the regular kind"
_______________
free speech for the dumb
The sincerest form of flattery will then level the playing field, and the next thing you know, we're waging war with no human casualties.
Earth's puny humans need more, not less incentives to aggression.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
booby-traps? aren't they autonomous 'robots'?
Blinding weapons are banned? Not so.
From that article:
[...] a soldier he interviewed after an incident in Iraq a few years ago. While on duty, the soldier fumbled a dazzler he was trying to point at an oncoming vehicle a safe distance away. “He was in an awkward position and illuminated a rearview mirror in such a way that he got a beam directly back into the eye.” The beam had gone less than 6 metres when it hit the soldier in the centre of vision of his right eye, burning the retina and leaving his vision in that eye permanently damaged.
Yeah, right. Blinding lasers are banned from military use, except that the military uses them and (from the article) are being made available to police departments.
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers? Is the ban only for *combat* soldiers and not policing soldiers? Is it only banned in *declared wars*, and not *non-war military invasions*?
Can anyone explain why we use dazzlers when they appear to be on the banned list?
"Fully autonomous weapons are not unambiguously bad. They can reduce burdens on soldiers."
I don't want the burdens on soldiers to be reduced. I want killing to be as hard on people as possible, so they think before they do it.
And they kill thousands of innocent non-combatants every year, and have been banned by most civilized nations--not including the US of A, sadly. So if your point is that land mines demonstrate what a horrible idea autonomous killer robots is, I agree.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Remember that? That was the 1928 pact that outlawed war.
You might remember how well that worked out.
This will work out just swell until Russia or China or ISIS develop an effective fighting robot and are able to deploy them in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference in battle.
Plus there's the impossibility of enforcement. How can you prove it was a robot rather than a remote-operated drone?
And there's the tiny issue that, knowing how slowly the wheels of the "international community's" court systems turn, the war is likely to be won or lost before those violating it ever come to trial...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I would be all for killer robots with software designed to not kill when dumb weapons always would. Like a missile that can recognize children/other likely noncombatants near a target and abort the strike.
Drones that just fly for days and look for people to kill would be a problem, yes.
Mines seem to qualify as "fully autonomous weapons". Once activated, they will kill indiscriminately.
I doubt that we'll arrive at a categorical distinction for "fully autonomous weapons".
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Just saying.... you are going to have to pry my auto-turret from my cold dead fingers.
They've saved far more lives than they've taken.
A robot will be assumed to have much greater leeway to determine NOT to fire, versus today's trip wires and pressure plates.
Robots that kill the enemy will "save lives' and keep soldiers from harm.
Is this going to be part of the new Slashdot too?
Scorta futuere amo!
Is it because if killer robots can deliver a lower collateral damage rate than humans, it will be a job killer?
They've saved far more lives than they've taken.
Citation needed. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people are killed each year by landmines. What you really mean is that you don't live with them in your community, and are therefore unconcerned by the impact of these killing devices. And now you think autonomous, mobile killing machines is a *good* idea. If you live in the USA, then it might pay to do some research in the militarisation of your police forces - and then think about whether you really want these kinds of things being built by the military-industrial complex.
It's good luck to be superstitious
There's no better comment that succinctly states why fully autonomous killer robots are a bad idea.
Another great example is the first eight minutes of the 2014 version of Robocop. Satire at its best, and Samuel L. Jackson doesn't disappoint. (Ignore the rest of the movie...it was terrible. But the first eight minutes were absolutely brilliant. Honestly. Rent the movie, watch the first eight minutes, and then just skip the rest.) He begins the movie with the following: "What if I told you that even the worst neighborhood in America could be made completely safe. And what if I told you that this could be accomplished without risking the life of one single law enforcement officer. How do I know this? Because it's happening right now in every country in the world but this one." And then we're taken to the streets of Iran, where fully autonomous robots patrol the streets. Honestly, it's absolutely brilliant.
If they don't yet exist what do they classify sentry guns as? I thought both korea and Israel used them?
They've saved far more lives than they've taken.
A robot will be assumed to have much greater leeway to determine NOT to fire, versus today's trip wires and pressure plates.
bullshit, thousands die every year from landmines. nearly all of them innocent victims.
how does your family being police relate to the 10's of thousands that die from landmines each year? feel free to look it up yourself rather than remain ignorant. Information is available on official sites like the UN.
1. An active area denial weapon.
There could be complications.
From what I recall, the US uses landmines with electronic triggers, and are designed to automatically self-destruct or self-deactivate at a preset future time or by electronic signals. These mines use internal batteries and require active electronic triggering, and are designed with fixed battery lifetimes as a failsafe in the event of some electronic failure.
The reason we haven't stopped using them is because they're a very effective deterrent when faced in a defensive position against a numerically superior foe. That describes many of our positions across the world, like in South Korea. Remember, that war never actually ended, and NK verbally threatens to flatten South Korean cities on a pretty regular basis. This is likely one of the primary reasons we didn't ratify that treaty. A good case can be made that we should no longer be defending South Korea or many other regions around the world, but US troops are still there right now, and they need to be able to protect themselves.
Smarter weapons systems can actually save innocent lives - a lesson that many people seem to miss. We used to wage war rather indiscriminately, burning entire cities to the ground, or nuking them into oblivion. Nowadays, we'd just cruise missiles in, or drop deep penetrating ordinance to decapitate the leadership, or target critical war assets much more precisely. Autonomous weapons systems are the natural progression of this trend, and if anything, will probably be used mostly for peacekeeping missions.
It would be nice if banning weapons systems would prevent armed conflicts, but I think the real key to preventing wars and armed conflict is continued diplomacy and improved economic development throughout the world. Happy and well-fed democratic countries generally don't start wars. The "killer robots" are for when things don't work out as well as we'd hoped, and generally speaking, it's unlikely that the military would ever allow them to pull the trigger on their own anyhow.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"WHY?"
I don't believe that you are really so naive.
It's a machine not a robot. Like most things, there is no clear boundary, but it is clear that the two ends of the spectrum are very different. Likewise it is clear that simple contraptions are not robots.
Refugees and/or evacuees don't deserve to be slaughtered because they took a path someone decided was a great place for autonomous killing machines.
Automated does not meany unattended. One person at the off switch of a group of guns will fix that issue.
it should be fine to plant massive mine fields in any place you don't have active troops.
Two issues with your statement;
1. I never said anywhere. In a well marked and possibly fenced area it would be fine.
2. The problem with land mines is that they can not be easily turned off. Automated gun positions can.
I'm not sure you thought that belief through very well.
Sorry but I think it is you that needs more thinking.
Well I have an Android phone and run Windows at work, so I have a pretty good idea of what it's like living with land mines.
There is an excellent argument for sentient robot soldiers and that is in the realm of collateral damage.
Today's "smart bombs" typically have a kill radius of 30m and a maim radius of 50m. This means that for one "surgical kill", dozens of non combatant deaths are likely (and do) occur.
A smart sentient robot could, instead, enter an area, only killing to gain access, before assassinating the intended target. There may be nearly zero non combatant deaths. There would also be a lot fewer maimed and no unnecessary infrastructure damage.
Surely, a war with sentient AIs would be more humane than todays so-called precision bombings?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Missile defence systems normally have a fully autunomous setting.
The machine is trusted not to shoot down airlines.
I can name three countries that would not exist today without land mines;
1. South Korea
2. Taiwan
3. Israel
Used properly as by these three countries land mines are an equalizer. Used improperly as in South East Asia and Africa they are a menace.
What land is Taiwan mining? They're an island. They don't have land borders with their enemies.
Mining beaches is a great way to deter invasion. Up until 2013 Kinmen and Matsu Islands were heavily mined to deter invasion by China. An invasion of the main island could not take place without neutralizing those islands first. Taiwan has removed those land mines but has not destroyed their stockpile. They can still be deployed if China looks like they will invade.
I find it sad that the people who want to ban land mines will not guarantee the sovereignty of the countries that need them to exist.
really?
1. so you think the massive amount of troops and equipment along the border today with international support isn't stopping NK. But mines in the ground that will kill a few thousand troops from a country that doesn't give a shit about people will stop them or act as even a minor deterent? are you retarded?
2. again the quarter million standing army and the international backlash that china would face is what stops china. China is a well equipped army with everything from mine sweepers, a massive army and again a government that has shown somewhat indifference to human life and you reckon it is the land mines that is stopping them?
3. Israel is backed by billions of dollars of state of the art military equipment 200k active personnel and half a million reservists as well as many of the worlds largest militaries behind it and still you reckon it is land mines that is why they survive.
I did a very brief bit of research on this... As it turns out, we haven't actually deployed any landmines after 1991, apparently except for *one* single munition used in Afghanistan. I can't help but wonder what the hell one single landmine would be used for.
We also don't currently have any deployed minefields anywhere in the world. So, it's certainly not a case of "continual use". While we haven't signed the Ottowa Treaty banning the use of landmines, the US is the single largest donor in helping to decontaminate regions and providing assistance for victim's medical care, to the tune of 2.3 billion dollars since 1993.
The US does currently have a stockpile of them, but is no longer manufacturing, exporting, or importing them. The military is prohibited from deploying any mines that lack a self-deactivation mechanism. Our landmine stockpiles will likely be phased out with the development of viable alternatives... probably killer robots.
For what it's worth, I hope we can eventually get rid of the damned things as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Those were really pretty bad weapons though. Beyond their faulty IFF, the real problem with those is that they're not viable for stopping a large incursion. They're good at stopping some scouts perhaps but not an incursion. What is more, they're not very efficient. Because of their burrowing nature they don't have much range which requires a lot of them to secure an area. Ideally, you'd want something that would be almost analogous to a human defender. That is a robot that can both move and dig in to make use of local cover/camouflage. A viable unit should contain a minimum of three weapons platforms. First, you're going to need a sniper rifle analog. That is an efficient high accuracy long range anti personnel weapon. Next you're going to need some sort of close support anti infantry weapon in case they think they can just rush it. Mortars and machine guns might be fine. Then you're going to need some sort of anti armor weapon in case they think they can push across your lines with armor.
The size of the drone might be around the size of an ATV or a golf cart. They would deploy with a mesh sensor network so they were aware of each other and any threats detected anywhere in their network. They should ideally adopt overlapping fields of fire or spheres of responsibility so that given units can be destroyed, retreat, or malfunction without leaving a gap in the line.
The virtue of a system like this would be its mobility and versatility. You could move your perimeter forward every day with the press of a button and risk no allied human lives doing it.
And if you wanted to use the drones hostily... you'd just overlap the denial zone with wherever the enemy is...
Also, I think the screamers were von neumann machines that self replicated. That is also a bad idea. The correct way to do that is to have "doers" and "makers" and not to have a doer that is also a maker. The difference would be in the event that you had that kind of technology, that you'd have a mobile micro factory that would pump out attack drones but the factory itself would not be an attack drone. The factories and the drones would be in separate command nets with distinct command codes. What is more, while the drones might require a certain amount of intelligence and flexibility, the factories could be very simple from a programming perspective and incapable of complex independent action.
Suffice to say... people have thought about that problem and solutions have been found.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, the US is well behaved, as far as these things go, mapping the mines, making them auto-deactivate and detectable. But the problem is, the US is seen as a beacon of morality. Maybe less so than it used to be, but the rest of the world still has fairly high expectations. If the US is using landmines, other countries can us this as a moral justification to do the same.
The US doesn't need to use them in Korea. They can cede responsibilities for those to South Korea. Pointing to what South Korea does is a far less compelling moral argument.
However, on the matter of Korea, the proposed alternative is autonomous guns. Unlike mines, these things don't hide, so, at the very least, we know if all of them are accounted for. But these could be banned by an overly broad anti-robot rule.
Maybe the new rules can specify that the target (set) must be specified in advanced and that it's possible to cancel the mission after deployment if the deployment lasts longer than say 2 minutes.
Table-ized A.I.
Refugees and/or evacuees don't deserve to be slaughtered because they took a path someone decided was a great place for autonomous killing machines.
Automated does not meany unattended. One person at the off switch of a group of guns will fix that issue.
I think you are both missing the bigger picture. Land mines, as they are currently constituted, are not very discerning. They explode automatically when someone steps on a trip wire or pressure plate. Man, woman, or child, the end result is all the same: kaboom! An autonomous robot, on the other hand, could be taught to not shoot children who wandered into areas they were not supposed to be in. And, since robots don't panic under stress, they can be sent out to take care of ambiguous situations where the intentions of interlopers are not clear. Despite the the Hollywood buzz, I would actually expect that autonomous robots should decrease civilian casualties because robots can be sent into hazardous situations where a panicky human soldier would be constantly trying to assess ambiguous clues concerning personal threat levels. Robots are not scared of dying. Robots do not have family and friends who will grieve if they are killed in action. Robots are expendable, while human soldiers are not.
1.Compare North Korea to South Korea and you will see that including reserves North Korea out matches South Korea. The US has about 29k troops there. That is meaningless if the North decides to attack.
2. It is not the only thing but it may be a deciding factor.
3. Combining Egypt and Jordan they have 539Ktroops. Part of that billions in armaments is landmines. The US may come to help but it would take time. I doubt any other country would come. They have never in the past. Even the US have never had boots on the ground in Israel in an invasion of Israel.
You have no idea what mines do or how they work. Their job is not to kill but to slow the enemy down and funnel them into killing areas where other assets like artillery does the killing.
As for international backlash. it sure has worked well for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. Backlash is only important if it has teeth and no one wants to stand up for other countries.
What's the point of having war if it isn't hell.
like, eg., Predator drones?
The move from that to autonomy is mostly software...
We also don't currently have any deployed minefields anywhere in the world. So, it's certainly not a case of "continual use".
I take it that you are ascribing the Korean DMZ mine fields to the South Koreans then, even though they are supplied, placed and maintained by US forces?
Broken robots can be repaired. Dead humans cannot be brought back to life. I for one would like to see all wars be strictly robot vs robot and may the best robot builders win.
I suppose you could ban autonomous robots from waging war against human adversaries, but I think that is somewhat pointless even if you could get the whole world to agree. We are probably hundreds of years away from having AI that can challenge even rather dumb human minds.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It's already being used. The border between NK and SK are guarded by autonomous robots with machine guns.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
The Phalanx system on US navy ships is, once activated, pretty much automatic. Anything within it's radar envelope automatically gets a dose of 20mm cannon fire. It's designed to take down anti-ship missiles, but will engage pretty much anything moving towards the boat that it's radar can pick up.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What is the difference between Robot vs Self Guided missiles?
Personally I think we should be more concerned with nuclear armed Tomahawk than, for example South Korea's autonomous sentry robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The group that's complaining doesn't realize that we've deployed "killer robots" for a century now - they're called mines and especially naval mines. They may not be your traditional humanoid Robbie the Robot with a gun, but they are fully autonomous, capable of selecting targets on their own, and definitely capable of killing people. Many of the arguments they make in the article are bogus anyway. If you took the text and substituted "people" for "robot" it would read just as well and make just as much sense. The authors act like people don't routinely mess up, make bad decisions, follow charismatic, insane evil overlords, or do generally nasty things to each other for very little reason all the time.
Very old news. After all, isn't a landmine just an updated type of punji pit?
definition of robot...
A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer
landmines on the other hand only have a few simple states, "safe", "armed", "detonated", "dud" they are simple single purpose constructs. It's not right to call them robots in any technical sense.
I guess I'm just going to have to stick to making the legal kind of droid. Yep, that's him! Toootally legal!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Unlike an atomic bomb, creating autonomous drones with a machine gun (or simply a suicide payload) can probably already be done today, using mostly of the shelf components and software. A terrorist attack using a swarm of these things or even a simple murder by suicide bombing drones is probably very feasible today. I'm surprised (and relieved...) this has not happened yet.
While I'd very much like to see a world without autonomous weapons, that's just not going to happen; they're just too simple to make. Prohibiting them makes no sense. Instead, we need to work on our defense. I expect to see cities guarded by swarms of armed drones in the very near future. It's the only defense against hostile swarms of drones.
0x or or snor perron?!
TFA lists short run arguments against autonomous robot killers, but a long run argument is that with them, the arms race will get so out-of-control that it will entirely consume the worlds' economies. Once both "sides" have them, they'll just fight amongst themselves, and both sides will have to deploy better and more numerous bots. Since no humans will be dying, there'll be much less pressure to restrict the scale of the wars. With R/C killers, there's still some limit on how many killers can operate per human (necessary to make the kill decision). Even if they do everything autonomously except kill, that still imposes some kind of limit. What happens when all the world is destitute? Chaos, unrestricted warfare, etc. So banning these things isn't a bad idea. The biggest problem I see with enforcing a ban is discerning between R/C killers and fully autonomous killers. R/Cs will become so sophisticated that they'll do everything themselves up to the point of pulling the trigger. From an outside observer, would it be clear whether a human ordered it to execute or an additional single line of code did it? "Today there are no victims of fully autonomous weapons..." Really? How do you know? Author should have said "...as far as I know."
This group wants a ban on using "killer robots" because it fears they may do things (e.g. killing civilians) that are already banned. If you can't enforce the old "no killing civilians" ban, why would you be any more able to enforce the new "no killer robots" ban?
When I was researching my earlier answer, even those Korea is stated as an exception to our policy, I read:
The US does not maintain any minefields globally after removing its mines from around Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba from 1996-1999.
I took that statement to mean that the US had probably turned over management of those minefields to the Koreans. This blog on the wsj says the same thing, but doesn't give sources.
So, yes, actually. It looks like those minefields are maintained by the Korean forces - they manufacture their own mines now, and we no longer manufacture nor export them. It could very well be that it's just a convenient technicality so the US can make such a statement, of course.
The South Koreans have a bat-shit-insane northern neighbor that still occasionally declares to the world that it's going to conquer them, so I don't think South Korea cares much about what the world thinks of landmines. It's sort of hard to blame them, honestly.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
uuuhm, not sure about you, but I consider armed drones and gps-guided bombs killer robots ...
There is only one reason anybody would want to ban these weapons. They can not create weaponry to compete. That is a GOOD thing. If people know that there is absolutely zero chance that they can win a war -- if they know that they will not even get the opportunity to actually fight enemy soldiers and they will have to sacrifice blood while their enemy doesn't -- then they will be less likely to go to war. Think of ISIS. Do you think they'd be so keen on starting a war with the West if they understood that the only result will be their annihilation with machines? Do you think their "holy war / jihad" recruitment propaganda would work if there were exactly zero chance that they would so much as get to fire on "infidels"?
I wholeheartedly welcome the development of this technology. And I seriously doubt that any of the nations capable of producing it will allow it to be banned.