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US Seeks To Allay Fears Over Killer Robots (bbc.com)
Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, the US Department of Defense said today. From a report: The statement comes as plans emerge for gun platforms that can choose their own targets on the battlefield. The plans seek to upgrade existing aiming systems, using developments in machine intelligence. The US said rules governing armed robots still stood and humans would retain the power to veto their actions. The defense department's plans seek to upgrade the current Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (Atlas) used on ground combat vehicles to help human gunners aim. The military is seeking commercial partners to help develop aiming systems to "acquire, identify, and engage targets at least three times faster than the current manual process."
"The US said rules governing armed robots still stood and humans would retain the power to veto their actions."
Uh, say WHAT? That line says something completely different from 'requiring human finger on every trigger'.
"Yeah, I coulda - probably shoulda - vetoed that Predator bombing on the wedding, but I was in the can at the time."
I, for one, proclaim that their decision to call it a lethality system has allayed my fears.
For anyone not familiar, the entire premise of the game is that you're in a post-apocalyptic world about 1000 years after our war robots went out of control, with exactly the sorts of results you'd expect. I found it interesting when, in a moment of self-awareness, the main character discovers a recording circa 2065 of an engineer who worked on the war robots lamenting the fact that they didn't pay attention to the warnings that were everywhere in the science fiction material of the day. More or less, we already had a good notion of how this would end, so why, oh why, did we go along with it?
Honestly, I do wonder how we can avoid a bad outcome. After all, if we don't build them, our opponents will (for whatever definition of "opponent" you want to pick), since taking the human out of the loopwill eventually confer a large tactical advantage. It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?
Armed robots enable oppression by reducing violence to the 'press of a button'. Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authority shows us how that one goes.