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."

Comments

better idea

[phantomfive]

Why don't we figure out a way to end war? There are better ways to resolve conflict than killing each other.

Re: better idea

[prefec2]

This is quite obvious. We as in all flipping humans. Including you and the president of China.

Re:better idea

[phantomfive]

Great idea. 2000 years ago they nailed someone to a tree for saying that. And I don't think the general attitude has changed that much.

Maybe. The number of deaths over time from war has dropped dramatically, not even adjusting for population growth.

Western Europe has managed to completely give up fighting each other, and that was after millennia of fighting each other. So in 2000 years a lot has improved.

Re:better idea

[Dutch Gun]

I think perhaps "ending war" is looking at the wrong end of things, because there's nothing much you can do other than say "let's be nice to each other." Peace isn't obtained by banning weapons of war. It's obtained when there's no longer any reason to fight a war. Or, perhaps put more cynically, when both sides have too much to lose by fighting a war.

Let's start by making the world free and prosperous, and encouraging the free trade of not only products, but culture and ideas. I have a feeling that things will work themselves out from there rather than simply trying to ban any new weapons systems. Naturally, we will probably never eradicate war completely, but modern, prosperous democracies have a reasonably good track record of not trying to obliterate each other, at least compared to historical precedents.

Re:better idea

[ScentCone]

For starters, the US (and other countries) should stop using drones to kill people.

Yes, it makes much more sense to go back to using manned aircraft in those situations, because that way the aircraft can be louder, bigger, and burn more jet fuel. As a bonus, the planes can perform a lot more dangerous in-flight refueling maneuvers, or make make many more trips to the same region, require larger localized airbases and far more on-the-ground support people and a bigger supply chain.

Or are you really saying you'd prefer that we use a massive ground force to attempt to achieve the same goals?

Oh, I get it. You're speaking code. When you say you don't want drones to be used, what you really mean is you don't want people like ISIS to be counter-attacked, or for it to be risky for groups like Boko Harom or AQAP to move their leadership and people around between attacks on infidel schools, that sort of thing. Can you expand on why you think that's a good thing?

catch them or help those countries to catch them and give them a fair trail.

Oh, I get it, now, You DO want a huge new ground invasion into places like Syria and a giant new force back on the ground in Iraq, so that we can surround and capture thousands of heavily armed militants in what would be a sustained series of big battles and firefights ... which the jihaddis would make absolutely sure occurred in and around innocent civilians, which they've shown repeatedly they're more than happy to see die in order to score propaganda points. Why you prefer prolonged gun battles in populated areas in order to capture people who post videos of themselves torturing people to death in the name of their religion (rather than simply removing them from the battlefield when we catch them out on the road in a vehicle or small convoy) is beyond me. You seem to have no problem with huge numbers of casualties in the interests of trying to capture for trial people who would see a ground force coming for them weeks in advance. Strange priorities you have.

Alternatively, we could say to Ukrainians, NATO, EU and Russia to stop the bloody stupidity taking place in Ukraine

I see. So we should tell Russia to stop attacking Ukrainian military positions, and that will cause Putin to stop doing so? Do you pay no attention at all to what's going on? The Russians have already been "told" to stop invading Ukraine, and they agreed to do so. But of course they're still doing it, and shelling Ukrainian positions every day. What, specifically, do you think should be said to Putin, differently, that would have him change his mind about lying, the way he's doing right now? What words would you use? Be specific.

No, I do not trust the Russians.

Then why are you even saying what you're saying?

However, the West violated with that missile shield the post cold war treaty.

"The west" has violated no such thing. The Soviet Union no longer exists, though it sounds like you'd prefer that it does.

Re:better idea

[MightyMartian]

As a resident of a Western liberal democracy, I can tell you right now I don't want to sacrifice my liberties in the likely hopeless cause of no more war. I want my way of life preserved; judicially, politically, economically, diplomatically, and yes, if need be, by force of arms. If the Chinese wish to live under autocratic technocrats, so be it. If they want to do business with us, fine too. But no way in hell do I want those ruthless men calling the shots on my liberties, and if a war has to be fought to prevent that, then so be it.

It's not that I want wars, and I hope that our leaders go out of their way to avoid them, and certainly can criticize them when they don't, but the idea of "one world government" where the Butchers of Beijing start getting a say over how citizens in democracies conduct themselves is not something I want to contemplate.

Re: better idea

[MightyMartian]

I suggest you take a look at what China is doing in the South China Sea and its economic activities in Africa. China is stealthily building its own economic empire. Despite all Putin's machismo and brutality, it's no accident that the US is more concerned about China as a medium and long term threat than Russia.

Re:better idea

[Kergan]

Europe didn't *completely* give up fighting. Let's not forget the Balkans after the break up of Yugoslavia. Or Ukraine in recent months.

Re: better idea

[itzly]

Sure, just as not long ago murder was an alternative to solve personal conflicts. Fortunately, the evolution of society made it a more costly alternative, as in you'll pay with the restriction of your liberty if you choose it.

There are plenty of places in the world where killing is still an accepted way to solve personal conflicts.

Re: better idea

[FlyHelicopters]

Sure, just as not long ago murder was an alternative to solve personal conflicts. Fortunately, the evolution of society made it a more costly alternative, as in you'll pay with the restriction of your liberty if you choose it.

Yes, that works because there is a government over the top of society.

At the end of the day, you lack the power to fight the government, so if they want to put you into prison, they can.

War exists because at the end of the day, when two nations can't agree and one side doesn't want to "go the other way", then war happens.

Negotiation requires to people to want to do it. If one side decides that they want more than the other side will give, their other option is to take it by force of arms.

War doesn't require the other side to work with you, it allows you to use force to get what you want.

Re: better idea

[FlyHelicopters]

You may recall that the US asked Afghanistan to hand over Bin Laden and the Taliban refused?

Thank you... this...

At the end of the day, if one nation wants something (whatever it is) that another nation has, and the other nation doesn't want to give it up, war is one of the possible solutions.

I don't like violence, but sometimes it works pretty darn well.

Re:better idea

[ultranova]

War should be costly, difficult, and sap your resources. Otherwise you make mass killing far too easy.

So what happens when you do have a costly, difficult war that saps your resources? Why propaganda of course! And the effects of that propaganda don't simply go away when the war is done. Neither will the military-industrial complex which now represents a huge proportion of your GDP. A costly war requires the entire society to be reshaped around it, and thus acquires a life of its own, which lasts way beyond the cessation of hostilities. The ghost of World War I persisted and took shape again in Soviet Union whose economy was modeled after wartime Germany, then World War II, then in Cold War and its sub-conflicts, and is currently busy guiding Russia in Ukraine.

No, wars should be as cheap and easy as possible, because the less you have to worry about the economic or domestic political effects the more you can worry about things like casualties and global political effects. Also: "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier." Well, with drones you can take the less ruthless option, since you're no longer risking your own troops but a soulless industial automat, and thus can minimize civilian - or even enemy combatant - casualties.

The less war disturbs a society, the less likely it's to become an essential part of the culture of that society. Just look at Israel-Arab conflict in the Middle East for a good example of a war that's basically chronic and can't end without the societies in question undergoing at least minor cultural revolutions, because at this point it's an essential part of their mythology - people's idea of what it means to live in Middle East.

Re:Fucking cowards

[meerling]

War has pretty much always been a tradeoff and tech development to kill the other guy while not getting killed myself. That's why they started using armor, and ranged weapons, and landmines, and war elephants, and oh so many other things. This is really just a new twist on an old concept, but at least this time, it's controversial before it's been developed.

Re:Isn't a Claymore or mine an "autonomous" weapon

[MightyMartian]

Traps are fundamentally defensive in nature. Autonomous robotic soldiers are offensive.

Autonomous weapons are for politicians

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:No

[Shakrai]

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.

Cripes

[seven of five]

Thought headline said "UN To Debut Lethal Autonomous Weapons"