Killer Robots: Natural Evolution, or Abomination?

Ask one technologist and he or she might say that lethal autonomous weapons — machines that can select and destroy targets without human intervention — are the next step in modern warfare, a natural evolution beyond today’s remotely operated drones and unmanned ground vehicles.

Others will decry such systems as an abomination and a threat to International Humanitarian Law (IHL), or the Law of Armed Conflict.

The U.N. Human Rights Council has, for now, called for a moratorium on the development of killer robots. But activist groups like the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) want to see this class of weapon completely banned. The question is whether it is too early — or too late — for a blanket prohibition. Indeed, depending how one defines “autonomy,” such systems are already in use.

From stones to arrows to ballistic missiles, human beings have always tried to curtail their direct involvement in combat, said Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology. Military robots are just more of the same. With autonomous systems, people no longer do the targeting, but they still program, activate and deploy these weapons.

“There will always be a human in the kill chain with these lethal autonomous systems unless you’re making the case that they can go off and declare war like the Cylons,” said Arkin, referring to the warring cyborgs from “Battlestar Galactica.” He added, “I enjoy science-fiction as much as the next person, but I don’t think that’s what this debate should be about at this point in time.”

Peter Asaro, however, is not impressed with this domino theory of agency. A philosopher of science at The New School, in New York, and co-founder of ICRAC, Asaro contends robots lack “meaningful human control” in their use of deadly force. As such, killer robots would be taking the role of moral actors, a position that he doubts they are capable of fulfilling under International Humanitarian Law. That’s why, he says, these systems must be banned.

Choosing targets, ranking values

According to the Law of Armed Conflict, a combatant has a duty to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. This means using weapons in a discriminating fashion and making sure that, when civilians do get killed in action, their incidental deaths are outweighed by the importance of the military objective — a calculation that entails value judgments.

In terms of assessing a battlefield scene, no technology surpasses the ability of the human eye and brain. “It’s very aspirational to think that we’ll get a drone that can pick a known individual out of a crowd. That’s not going to happen for a long, long, long, long time,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, director of MIT’s Human and Automation Laboratory, and a former F-18 pilot. [Drone Wars: Pilots Reveal Debilitating Stress Beyond Virtual Battlefield]

Still, a fully autonomous aircraft would do much better than a person at, say, picking up the distinctive electronic signature of a radar signal or the low rumbling of a tank. In fact, pilots make most of their targeting errors when they try to do it by sight, Cummings told Live Science.

As for a robot deciding when to strike a target, Arkin believes that human ethical judgments can be programed into a weapons system. In fact, he has worked on a prototype software program called the Ethical Governor, which promises to serve as an internal constraint on machine actions that would violate IHL. “It’s kind of like putting a muzzle on a dog,” he said.

As expected, some have voiced much skepticism regarding the Ethical Governor, and Arkin himself supports “taking a pause” on buildinglethal autonomous weapons. But he doesn’t agree with a wholesale ban on research “until someone can show some kind of fundamental limitation, which I don’t believe exists, that the goals that researchers such as myself have established are unobtainable.”

Of robots and men

Citing the grisly history of war crimes, advocates of automated killing machines argue that, in the future, these cool and calculating systems might actually be more humane than human soldiers. A robot, for example, will not gun down a civilian out of stress, anger or racial hatred, nor will it succumb to bloodlust or revenge and go on a killing spree in some village.

Read more . . .