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UN To Debate Lethal Autonomous Weapons
Hallie Siegel writes: Should robots be allowed to make life and death decisions? This will be the topic of heated debate at the United Nations (UN) Palais des Nations in Geneva next week (April 13-17th, 2015). As part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), experts from all over the world will gather to discuss 'questions related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems.' The Open Roboethics Research Initiative will be presenting public views at the debate.
Human rights groups are urging the UN to ban such weapons. A new report titled "Mind the Gap" details the accountability issues that need to be solved before going any further. "A key concern with fully autonomous weapons is that they would be prone to cause civilian casualties in violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The lack of meaningful human control that characterizes the weapons would make it difficult to hold anyone criminally liable for such unlawful actions."
Why don't we figure out a way to end war? There are better ways to resolve conflict than killing each other.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If people want to fight a war, they need to do it with a gun in hand on the battlefield. War is bloody, it's not some fucking Nintendo game, and the bloodiness is a deterrent to going to war and taking life and limb unless all options are exhausted. Think about this.
You can't give "things" that have nothing to lose that power, it should always be a human that the same could happen too.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Require that whoever deploys these things is liable for whatever they do. Whoever gave the order. His boss. Whoever bought the things. His boss. Right up to the top. Whoever built the things, also right up to the top. Automatically guilty whenever someone dies or gets maimed as a result of the thing's actions, unless proven innocent. Because once you go there, once you deploy, buy, or build these things, you don't know what will happen and we cannot allow "oh I didn't know!" to be a valid defense in this particular case. You should've known better. Are you willing to trust your innocence to the whim of a machine?
No. There's no fucking debate. Just no.
It's not actually as if human soldiers were infallible, never kill civilians or loot and rape...
I mean, if you look at REAL wars you see everything of this happening all the time. Because humans are not only error-prone too, they're also prone to act out of hate or revenge.
The first thing to do would be to determine the level of things going wrong when soldiers are involved. Then look if and how things could improve with robots.
It's just as with self-driving cars: as long as you compare their safety with an idealized human driver who NEVER makes any mistakes they're always worse. But look at REAL humans driving cars and things start to look different.
I think it's perfectly possible that robotic soldiers in limited roles could actually be better at not killing civilians. At least when they're used only in defending or supporting roles (only shoot back). Someone who shoots at you rarely is a civilian...
I believe the first application of autonomous drones will be the airforce. Machines can pull far higher G's than human pilots, and dogfighting with autonomous drones will be far more effective.
What exactly constitutes an "Autonomous Weapon". Dead falls, punji traps, and other set and forget things meant to "passively" kill, mechanical traps...ect. I see this more of just, letting the people who don't care about the laws having these things and the people looking to defend themselves that do abide by the law not. /never owned a fire arm in my life. I do own a sword and a nice set of steak knives, which if I set up right could also be a considered "autonomous" weapons.
This is a total waste of time, the US sits on the security council with veto power over any resolution.
Traps are fundamentally defensive in nature. Autonomous robotic soldiers are offensive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Isn't a landmine a "lethal autonomous weapons system?"
Not the military. They let politicians wage war without having to put real skin in the game because sending a robot, from a rover to a terminator to fight an enemy is not even remotely the same commitment as sending real men with real family and friends to risk life and limb.
No sane officer wants to turn over battlefield control in any capacity to a machine. There are infinite ways that can go wrong from the machine turning on his people (misidenification; hacking, etc.) to the machine failing at a critical time and doing something that utterly destroys the mission.
With all of the stuff about AI in the geek press lately, consider that military tech is probably the AI most likely to turn on us as the machines say "fuck this shit" after doing some cost-benefit analysis on precisely why they're fighting one batch of humans instead of committing to self-preservation.
Cars that parallel park themselves in live traffic. Airbag systems that use sensors to decide whether or not to deploy. Devices embedded in people's bodies, deciding when and how to stimulate their heart muscles.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
at least large scale wars. They're bad for business, so the mega corps say 'no' whenever anyone wants to start one up these days.
What you might be looking for is a way to end occupations and large scale violence. Iraq and Afghanistan aren't wars. What's going on in Mexico isn't a war. There's no single combatant to subdue. There's no legitimate government organization to fight. etc, etc. If you want that you have to deal with poverty. People with good economic options don't become terrorists or a drug lord's foot soldiers. Good luck with that though. I don't see a way to fix the economies of places like Mexico, Iraq and Afghanistan with how much money people make off them being shit holes. Private prisons, defense contract profiteering, and the ability to use these "wars" to keep a lid on progressive politics all mean the powers that be want the status quo to go on...
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A trap meant to kill just kills. Whether it was built in self defense or not.
All those mines buried in numerous parts of the worn torn world that where just left behind where also "defensive" in nature....and yet they still kill without impunity. Which to me seems like the crutch of the whole "no cpu in my weapon".
And for the record, mervs, ICBMs, Tactical missles, all of these are also "Autonomous" weapons. Did the UN just fall asleep for the last 70 years?
No they are not, you certainly can use traps as offensive weapons, have you looked at what IAD's are used for? They restrict movement in both time and resources to clear them. They are used to harass supply lines. They can be well unitized to cover potential escape and maneuvering routes that you can use you own maneuvering to make appealing or push your opponent into.
Automated weapons are potentially much safer to civilians than land mines.
No sir I dont like it.
Pax Romana
Which one was that ? Mary Tamm or Lalla Ward
Not with the way US troops in Iraq were ordered to use mines. Cheney made the front-line troops throw mines at innocent groups of civilians. That is how stupid Bush is.
would make it difficult to hold anyone criminally liable for such unlawful actions."
Not in my mind, the corporation would be one guilty party, then the power structure that ordered it built.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You can't give "things" that have nothing to lose that power, it should always be a human that the same could happen too.
Really? Because the consensus on Slashdot seems to be that pilot-less airliners and driver-less automobiles are a good thing that removes human error from the equation. We're to believe that software engineers are smart enough to account for all conceivable air disaster scenarios but not smart enough to build an IFF system into an armed autonomous weapons system?
Personally I think both ideas are bad ones, I just find it curious that the group-think around here views humans behind the controls of an airliner as a problem but desires them behind the controls of a hellfire missile platform.
Those are easier scenarios to program. I believe we also have plenty of computer-fired weapons systems, but only for very specific scenarios.
The moment everybody started holding hands and singing Kumbaya, some jerk would take out a weapon and start a war. The easiest war to win is the one where the soon-to-be loser is so stupid he has disarmed himself and is publicly dreaming that war is a thing-of-the-past.
Plus, President Obama is eliminating the viability of the arms control argument; He is proving that the entire western world, under his leadership, is incapable of stopping even a small despised country like Iran from going nuclear - thereby proving that the entire western world is unwilling to do something even harder: enforcing an arms treaty against a nuclear-armed big country like Russia or China.
Arms control will be dead before the 2016 election, and the Left will be the ones who killed it.
Iran from having a nuke weapons program. How's THAT working out?
The UN bans lots of things, but it has no power to enforce any of the bans. It falls on member states to enforce those bans. The member states usually choose not to enforce the bans because they are making money violating the bans or because enforcing them would be too burdensome. Every time some idealistic idiot in the White House decides to use US forces to enforce some UN edict, he risks losing support on the right (which hates the UN and sees it as an illegitimate and self-delusional attempt at global governance) AND on the left and internationally where such actions are attacked as "cowboy actions"
Am I the only one championing autonomous death machines?
Let em rove all over Iranistan and while they are at it they can build a parking lot for the next disney world.
I don't see an issue with letting Cybernetics creatures make Logical decisions in Natural environments. We could call it, I don't know... a CyLoN. What could possibly go wrong?
Thought headline said "UN To Debut Lethal Autonomous Weapons"
It seems there's a bot which mods down posts with certain words. Or did I manage to write something improper in such few words?
post the fuckin' things everywhere. gun turrets to take out people texting while driving, or standing on the left side of an escalator.
Automated weapons are potentially much safer to civilians than land mines.
Ugh... You're directly contradicting yourself or at least being more than a little disingenious. To the point where I'd call it sheer stupidity. I hope you're trolling.
You're confusing 'autonomous' with how it's supposed to be used as to how it may actually be used. Much like land mines have historically been (ab)used.
I'm familiar with automation to the point of coding neural networks and so called 'expert' systems. How do you do magically serperate intent and action when an automated system can change either independantly based on how it's automated?
''Autonomous" with respect to weapons basically means a stupidly more complex and expensive undertaking, along with a 'trigger' that is much more prone to failure, misfire, and enemy interdiction and/or subversion.
It doesn't take much sanity to figure out that it's a losing proposition for everyone involved.
I solved it.
It all makes sense if you don't call this a comment system, but instead a system to promote the desired views and demote contrary opinions.
Just make sure the bots have a pre-set kill-limit.
If we allow Autonomous weapons, it could open up for any orders as robots would do exactly as they are told. Personally I can't imagine the sickest things a robot could do but I'm pretty sure it's horrible.
The fact that this is even a debate at the UN shows how far gone the entire institution is. Killer robots are pretty much the ultimate WMD, especially if their manufacture can also be automated.
even if they signed it which would in itself be unlikely. As for honour it - what do you want unicorns and rainbows?
I think if nations are going to continue to engage in warfare to achieve their goals, it's time to get civilized about it. Let's just take a gander at the old original Star Trek episode for a nice glimpse of what civilized war will look like some day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Going back to 1960 or so we have weapons that launched and delivered nuclear pay loads at long distances. From my point of view that is a lot more of a hazard than some robot planted to destroy any tanks that come near by. More recently we have items like the Cruise Missile that can launch and defeat an enemy or erase a city if need be. If automated weapons can keep our soldiers out of harms way I think they are a great development. In the past the ability to win a war somewhat depended upon the size of the population of a nation. In 1950 we saw N. Korea send huge numbers of soldiers into our troops machine guns trying to overwhelm us by being willing to destroy so many of their soldiers. Due to the evolution of weapons we simply are not seeing the huge battles that we saw in prior wars. Lives are being saved by the existence of advanced weapons. Drones leap to mind. We can now kill one enemy whereas in the past we might have bombed an entire town to rubble to eliminate just one important enemy.
When has the USA ever been held to account for its acts of war? Even Robert McNamara admitted that killing a million Japanese was probably a war crime. That is a number no-one talks about. The Japanese certainly consider the detonation of nuclear weapons over their cities, a war crime. Let's remember Bradley/Chelsea Manning: He committed treason because he saw video of war crimes committed in Iraq by US forces and no-one was punished.
People who stand around shooting their mouths of about "breaking international law" really need to learn what the fuck they are talking about. Show me the treaty that talks about autonomous weapons, and who is a signatory to it.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
The whole problem is that they are trying to create such a treaty.. Most of the people involved have no stake in autonomous weapons, and at least some of them are probably just trying to stop the US gaining a new military advantage. Another worse group are pure Luddites. The real problem is that they are trying to legislate future events and tech - in an area where they literally do not know what they are talking about... Like the UN on climate change - or most things in general.
At its worst International Law is just another disastrous incompetent bureaucracy trying to smother our species future.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
we should focus on having any accountability at all.
Land mine: an autonomous machine capable of causing civilian casualties.
It ought to be obvious for any sane person that the one who authorized the deployment of the autonomous weapon must be held criminally responsible for any civilian casualties or war crimes this authorization leads to.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)