Soldier Bots:
2 May 2009
The USA military will be half machine and half human by 2015, they have no fear, they never need to sleep, and they don't get upset when the soldier next to them gets torn to pieces. They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication will herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on war.
Already in Iraq and Afghanistan there are hundreds of small robots helping bomb squads examine and disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from a safe distance. But this generation of robots are all remotely operated by humans. Researchers are now working on soldier bots which would be able to identify targets, weapons and distinguish between enemy forces like tanks or armed men and soft targets like ambulances or civilians.
The USA military has hired experts in the building of military robots to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator style killing machine that murders indiscriminately. By 2010 the USA will have invested $4 billion USD in a research programs into autonomous systems.
Samuel Huntington A British robotics expert has been recruited by the USA military to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions. And Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University's has just published a book on his views, entitled Moral Machines. Teaching Robots Right From Wrong.
The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech university, who is working on software for the USA military has written a report which concludes robots, while not perfectly ethical in the battlefield can perform more ethically than human soldiers.
As military robots gain more and more autonomy, the ethical questions involved will become even more complex. Autonomous robots could, in theory, follow the rules of engagement, they could be programmed with a list of criteria for determining appropriate targets and when shooting is permissible. The robot might be programmed to require human input if any civilians were detected.
An example of such a list at work might go as follows, “Is the target a Soviet made T 80 tank? Identification confirmed. Is the target located in an authorized free fire zone? Location confirmed. Are there any friendly units within a 200 meter radius? No friendlies detected. Are there any civilians within a 200 meter radius? No civilians detected. Weapons release authorized. No human command authority required.”
Such an “ethical” killing machine, though, may not prove so simple in the reality of war. Even if a robot has software that follows all the various rules of engagement, and even if it were somehow absolutely free of software bugs and hardware failures (a big assumption), the very question of figuring out who an enemy is in the first place that is, whether a target should even be considered for the list of screening questions is extremely complicated in modern war. It essentially is a judgment call.
It becomes further complicated as the enemy adapts, changes his conduct, and even hides among civilians. If an enemy is hiding behind a child, is it okay to shoot or not? Or what if an enemy is plotting an attack but has not yet carried it out? Politicians and lawyers could fill pages arguing these points.
However fully autonomous engagement also means that the robot can take risks that a human wouldn't otherwise, risks that might mean fewer mistakes. During the Kosovo campaign, for example, such a premium was placed on not losing any NATO pilots that they were restricted from flying below fifteen thousand feet so that enemy fire couldn’t hit them. In one case, NATO planes flying at this level bombed a convoy of vehicles, thinking they were Serbian tanks. It turned out to be a convoy of refugee buses. If the NATO pilots could have flown lower or had the high powered video camera of a drone, this tragic mistake might have been avoided.
The removal of risk also allows decisions to be made in a more deliberate manner than normally possible. Soldiers describe how one of the toughest aspects of fighting in cities is how you have to burst into a building and, in a matter of milliseconds, figure out who is an enemy and who is a civilian and shoot the ones that are a threat before they shoot you, all the while avoiding hitting any civilians. You can practice again and again, but you can never fully avoid the risk of making a terrible mistake in that split second, in a dark room, in the midst of battle. By contrast, a robot can enter the room and only shoot at someone who shoots first, without endangering a soldier’s life.
If we do stay on this path and decide to make and use autonomous robots in war, the systems must still conform with the existing laws of war. These laws suggest a few principles that should guide the development of such systems.
(1) Since it will be very difficult to guarantee that autonomous robots can, as required by the laws of war, discriminate between civilian and military targets and avoid unnecessary suffering, they should be allowed the autonomous use only of non lethal weapons. That is, while the very same robot might also carry lethal weapons, it should be programmed such that only a human can authorize their use.
(2) Just as any human’s right to self defense is limited, so too should be a robot’s. This sounds simple enough, but oddly the Pentagon has already pushed the legal interpretation that drones have an inherent right to self defense, including even to preemptively fire on potential threats, such as an anti aircraft radar system that lights them up. There is a logic to this argument, but it leads down a very dark pathway, self defense must not be permitted to trump other relevant ethical concerns.
(3) the human creators and operators of autonomous robots must be held accountable for the autonomous robots actions. If a programmer gets an entire village blown up by mistake, he should be criminally prosecuted, not get away scot free or merely be punished with a monetary fine his employer’s insurance company will end up paying. Similarly, if some future commander deploys an autonomous robot and it turns out that the commands or programs he authorized the robot to operate under somehow contributed to a violation of the laws of war, or if his robot were deployed into a situation where a reasonable person could guess that harm would occur, even unintentionally, then it is proper to hold the commander responsible.
To ensure that responsibility falls where it should, there should be clear ways to track the authority in the chain of design, manufacture, ownership, and use of unmanned systems, all the way from the designer and maker to the commanders in the field. This principle of responsibility is not simply intended for us to be able to figure out whom to punish after the fact, by establishing at the start who is ultimately responsible for getting things right, it might add a dose of deterrence into the system before things go wrong.
Not merely scientists, but everyone from theologians to the human rights and arms control communities must start looking at where this technological revolution is taking both our weapons and laws. These discussions and debates also need to be global, as the issues of robotics cross national lines (forty three countries now have military robotics programs). Over time, some sort of consensus might emerge if not banning the use of all autonomous robots with lethal weapons, then perhaps banning just certain types of robots.
Some critics will argue against any international discussions or against creating new laws that act to restrict what can be done in war and research. As Steven Metz of the Army War College says, “You have to remember that many consider international law to be a form of asymmetric warfare, limiting our choices, tying us down.” Yet history tells us that, time and again, the society that builds an ethical rule of law and stands by its values is the one that ultimately prevails on the battlefield. There is a “bottom line” reason for why we should adhere to the laws of war, explains a USA Air Force major general. “The more society adheres to ethical norms, democratic values, and individual rights, the more successful a warfighter that society will be.”
A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a "rush to market" mentality and the "common misconception" that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do. "Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to the time when computers were simpler and their programs could be written and understood by a single person," the study says. "Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways."
That's what might have happened during an exercise in South Africa in 2007, when a robot anti aircraft gun sprayed hundreds of rounds of cannon shell around its position, killing nine soldiers and injuring 14.
Even if a nation sending in its autonomous killing machines acts in a just cause, such as stopping a genocide, war without risk or sacrifice becomes merely an act of selfish charity. One side has the wealth to afford high technologies, and the other does not. The only message of “moral character” a nation transmits is that it alone gets the right to stop bad things, but only at the time and place of its choosing.
"In a world where money can buy everything, the rich will live and the poor shall die."
