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Debating a Ban On Autonomous Weapons (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: A pretty informative debate on banning autonomous weapons has just closed at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The debate looks at an open letter, published In July, 2015, in which researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics (and endorsed by high-profile individuals such as Stephen Hawking) called for 'a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.' The letter echoes arguments made since 2013 by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which views autonomous weapons as 'a fundamental challenge to the protection of civilians and to international human rights and humanitarian law.'
But support for a ban is not unanimous. Some researchers argue that autonomous weapons would commit fewer battlefield atrocities than human beings—and that their development might even be considered morally imperative. The authors in this debate focus on these questions: Would deployed autonomous weapons promote or detract from civilian safety; and is an outright ban the proper response to development of autonomous weapons?
But support for a ban is not unanimous. Some researchers argue that autonomous weapons would commit fewer battlefield atrocities than human beings—and that their development might even be considered morally imperative. The authors in this debate focus on these questions: Would deployed autonomous weapons promote or detract from civilian safety; and is an outright ban the proper response to development of autonomous weapons?
When it becomes human, it can't be trusted anymore.
When autonomous weapons are outlawed, only outlaws will have unstoppable armies of soulless killing machines.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
-OR-
/. forgot about the nasty downside of an autonomous doomsday devie.
how
But support for a ban is not unanimous. Some researchers argue that autonomous weapons would commit fewer battlefield atrocities than human beings—and that their development might even be considered morally imperative.
In particular, Dr. Miles Dyson and his associates, Drs. Skyler Natalya and Keel Lbot, Ph.D.
And the answer is when it becomes human.
Humans killed 400+ civilians at My Lai, and 200+ civilians at No Gun Ri. Both massacres were the result of rage and fear. Robots don't feel those emotions, and have committed no massacres on that scale. I trust robots more than I trust humans.
Restrictions on nuclear warheads, ships, etc. make sense because they can be verified. Restrictions on software have no means of verification, so any ban on autonomous robots is wishful thinking.
What's the difference between a search-and-rescue bot and a kill bot? The function is going to pretty much identical right up to the point the target is located, just duct tape a gun to point in same direction as the camera and wire the "person located" signal to pull the trigger. It's one thing to ban ABC weapons because they're very specific technologies, but this is way too generic to work. And it's not like the military is going to avoid developing it for intelligence gathering and decision support systems, even if you keep a human in the loop it's literally going to be one flip of the switch to full automatic where the computer's recommendations are implemented by itself.
The primary reason to keep soldiers in the loop today is because you're trying to fight a "good war" and avoid antagonizing the civilians so you want manual confirmation of each target, if you take the gloves off and say if you're found outside after curfew we'll shoot to kill and live with the collateral you could automate much more. And don't get up on the high horse, when the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew there's be about 100-200k civilian casualties. In a real war nobody's going to give a fuck if the robots are just 99% or 95% right, if it can save our troops and civilians and end the war for sure we're going to let them fight for us.
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Arguably while war is all about winning, it's not at "all cost". We (ignoring GOP presidential candidates) will not bomb an urban civilian center these days in order to kill a few hostile bad actors. Arguably the availability of precision munitions changed the moral balance from "bomb a city into submission" into the modern sensibility of "only bomb specific targets of military importance."
Even though war is a terrible and bloody affair, we as societies have constantly been moving towards more humane and less deadly conflict. It's one thing to shoot someone shooting at you. It's quite another to kill someone in cold blood. War is arguably largely about self defense today: "I have to shoot you in order to not die." The shift I see happening with autonomous weapons is that there is no imperative to shoot people shooting at you. It might be expensive or costly to lose an autonomous infantryman, but if you can capture without killing I suspect we'll expect our autonomous soldiers to exert "self control". Obviously if it's a shooter killing civilians you would be morally justified in stopping them using violent force if necessary but otherwise autonomous troops effectively become more akin to police officers than soldiers in their relationship to the population.
No, it's just that if an autonomous weapon does it, it would be more difficult to call it an "atrocity". If a dozen villagers are killed because of a minefield that some idiot decided should go near where they live, the only reason you can't call that a "massacre" is that there was no human making the targeting decision.
In the 1920s, there were some who argued that aerial bombing would be more humane because they could be far more precise than field artillery, hitting only the target that you want to hit. Look how well that worked out.
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Landmines kill little kids without asking. Do we want more things killing automatically?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Many restricted military technologies are fairly easy to detect. Nuclear weapons require a massive industrial input that has well known signatures, for example.
A robot is different. It can be something that's dual use. One day it's a regular robot. Look at the software. All civilian and a nice strong optics mount point on it.
Change the software and swap some of the camera gear for a small machine gun and use the rest for aiming, it's a killbot. This is just one example. Another obvious one is putting an autonomous drone software package into the flight computers of an airplane that can also be manned. This game can go on and on with just about any weapons system you can think of.
It doesn't take industrial facilities that are different from usual ones to make them. If you can make versatile robots for civilian use, and separately make weapons you just have to put them together at the last minute. They don't have any particular signatures the way chemical weapons and their precursors do. Most nations are already making ordinance, so who's to say whether a human is going to be in the loop to fire it or if it's triggered by an AI?
If people want to cheat on this, it'll be pretty easy to do so.
So far, the landmine bans haven't seemed to have slowed down the planting of them a bit in various wars. We have to have demining teams, not just for cleaning up old wars, but the very ones that are going on now.
I don't expect this to have a much greater effect.
That's something of a question, isn't it? What does "meaningful human control" translate to? Does it mean that a human has to okay each weapon discharge? Does it mean that we aren't supposed to release a swarm of von neumann kill-bots with 'destroy everything' as a goal? What if we release them in an area with orders to kill any humans with weapons that don't have a valid IFF signal?
In addition, I've seen with UN weapon ban treaties that they're sometimes used as a 'we don't have them, so you shouldn't either' tool. Who's closest to these sorts of weapons? The USA. Who's NOT going to agree with any treaty limiting the effective use of these weapons? The USA. Rendering the ban useless.
I don't read AC A human right
Robots also do not feel mercy, and they never question orders - no matter how deranged.
Pretty shit logical reasoning given that robots have never been in a position where they are capable of committing a massacre on that scale. Kim Jong Un has never ordered the use of nuclear weapons so maybe we should give him control of US nukes.
The biggest issue with robot soldiers isn't that they'll make "evil decisions" it's that when a country can engage in warfare without risking its civilians lives it's likely to get involved in more conflicts. That isn't to say that there are no valid concerns about how robots will be programmed, and ordered, to behave in the field as well.
There's some merit to that argument but it does seem that given how chemical and biological weapon remains very low in no small part due to the measures in place to restrict and punish it that there's some evidence that this process works.
The original Robocop movie correctly predicted how these things might turn out. Infallible is not the adjective to apply.
Still, at least it shot a company exec during a demo, so not a total failure.
Most wars are asymmetric. One side has all the big guns.
I can imagine several effects a player like the US would prefer:
- freedom to intervene. Using actual soldiers has provided a natural restraint on interventionism. You lose them you get complaints at home. This has changed warfare a lot and everyone wants to use airpower now and avoid landpower. Airpower itself is being replaced by remote controlled drones. For reasons I don't understand the huge financial cost of interventions is not felt directly by the population so it does not cause them to resist it.
- advanced technology provides good business for weapons manufacturers, and these are very powerful players.
- increase regulations so that advanced technology is required and less advanced technology is a war crime. You can see this at work in Israel where one side has advanced weaponry and the other side has scaled up firecrackers. Somehow the side with the firecrackers is committing a war crime every time it fires one while the side committing all the destruction just has to try to be 'even more humane'.
- legal advantages : if an automated system follows rules then one can only condemn/attack the rules. The rules themselves apply in a closed theoretical system meaning they can be made watertight on paper, and it doesn't matter much if they are ridiculous in reality.
I can probably think of others, but not right away...
Restrictions on nuclear warheads, ships, etc. make sense because they can be verified. Restrictions on software have no means of verification, so any ban on autonomous robots is wishful thinking.
Justifiable restrictions make sense, because putting rules into law means that those tasked with enforcing them are then allowed to take action - it clears away a hurdle. Bans are often like that - their intent is reactive, no proactive. It may not be possible to stop malicious software and hardware being developed or deployed, but at some point there may well be a reckoning, and then it becomes possible to determine whether a banned technology has been used, and the penalty can be adjusted accordingly.
The other important point to make is that when nations sign up to a treaty that bans something, then they will be very reluctant to ignore the ban (openly, at least), and of course, if they don't sign up to it, that tells us something as well. These things can have significant repercussions for the reputation of those countries.
Robots don't feel those emotions, and have committed no massacres on that scale. I trust robots more than I trust humans.
Do you trust a gun? Do you trust a bomb? Of course not, because the concept is meaningless: neither will cause harm without instructions from a human. Both can magnify the amount of harm that a human can do. Autonomous weapons, of which landmines are the simplest possible case, expand both the quantity that a person can do harm and the time over which they can do it.
During the cold war, there were at least two incidents where humans refused to follow legitimate orders to launch nuclear weapons - in either case, the likely outcome of following the orders would have been the deaths of many millions. The worst atrocities of the second world war were caused by people 'just following orders'. And you think that it's a good idea to remove the part of the chain of command capable of disobeying orders.
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What a shame that in this relatively late stage of human development we should still be debating the moral pluses and minuses of applying technology to kill each other. Talking about "offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control" and "autonomous weapons would commit fewer battlefield atrocities than human beings" - shouldn't we be raising the level of discourse? A lot?
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The majority of humans will follow orders no matter how deranged, even when they know its wrong.
Seeing as we have pretty good experimental proof that emotion will not override orders most of the time, then the benefit of positive emotions like empathy is functionally nil. However, negative emotional states WILL significantly alter a persons actions.
"I won't do that sir, its wrong" has saved very few people. "The enemy isn't human and should be exterminated" has gotten entire races exterminated. Given the options, not having emotion is a net gain.
You lack imagination.
Think of an autonomous weapon that lays dormant until it detects something in range, then wakes up, kills it and goes back to sleep.
A landmine on steroids.
You think that won't happen?
But robots could be turned on and ordered to do atrocities that no human would agree to do.
If a rogue general wanted to convince US soldiers to kill everyone in the White House, or to kill everyone in Congress, he would find it very difficult. It would take almost nothing for a rogue General to convince a squadron of drones to do the exact same thing.
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Honest question: Do you believe that there are situations where a country is either a) justified, or b) morally required to utilize force of arms?
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Not really true.
Yes, a modern force uses suppressive fire, which frequently is aimed more in the direction of the enemy, rather than an aimed shot at them. In that case, however, they're not aiming to miss, they're keeping the enemy's heads down while their compatriots are maneuvering into a better firing position. If someone pops their head up during suppressive fire, you can be pretty sure that they'll get aimed at.
The stat that you are seeming to give was a discredited one by a buy named S.L.A. Marshall who did studies that seemed to show that only 30% of troops actually fired their weapons on the battlefield in WWII. This was completely bogus. It appears that the guy didn't even actually talk to much of anyone, he just made that shit up.
It turns out that soldiers are fighting for their lives and they are doing whatever it takes to not get killed, including returning or even initiating fire on an enemy position. They may miss because the enemy isn't a stationary paper target that can't shoot back, but they are not *trying* to miss.
While S.L.A. Marshall sure didn't get his conclusions from the extensive interviews which he lied about, there's other evidence that suggests the same thing.
Consider battles of the musket era. Line up some of your soldiers, measure the frontage of the unit, find a fence of that length and height. Have your soldiers put a volley into it. Count the bullet holes. Put them up against an enemy line of the same size. Have them fire. You're going to get a lot fewer enemy hit than you'd expect from a fence, despite the fact that the fence doesn't present a danger, and you'd think the soldiers would try to be more accurate against targets that can shoot back. That's pretty definite, not something made up by someone who didn't do the research he claimed he did.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes