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The United States and many other nations currently operate military remote operated vehicles (ROVs) that are more commonly known as drones. While the ROVs began as surveillance devices, the United States found that they make excellent weapon platforms. The use of such armed ROVs has raised various moral issues, mainly in regards to the way they are employed (such as the American campaign of targeted killing). In general, ROVs themselves do not seem to pose a special moral challenge-after all, they seem to be on par with missiles and bombers (although the crew of a manned bomber is at risk in ways that ROV operators are not).
The great success of ROVs has created a large ROV industry and has also spurred on the development of true robots for military and intelligence use. While existing ROVs often have some autonomous capabilities, they are primarily directed by an operator. An autonomous robot would be capable of carrying out entire missions without human intervention and it is most likely simply a matter of time before “warbots” (armed autonomous robots) are deployed. As might be imagined, setting robotic killing machines loose raises some moral concerns.
On the positive side, warbots are not people and hence the use of warbots would lower the death and injury rate for humans-at least for the side that is deploying the warbots. Obviously, if warbots are deployed to kill humans, then there will still be human casualties. They will, however, be less than in human-human battles, at least in most cases. Given this fact, it would seem that warbots would be morally acceptable on utilitarian grounds: their use would reduce (in general) human death and suffering.
It could even be argued that future wars might be purely robot versus robot battles and thus eliminating human casualties altogether (assuming humans are still around: see for, example, the classic game Rivets). This would, presumably, be a good thing. Assuming, of course, that the robots would not be turned against humans.
While the idea of wars being settled by robots has some appeal, there is the concern that robots would actually make wars more likely to occur and easier to sustain. The current armed ROVs enable the United States to engage in military operations and targeted killings with no risk to Americans and this lack of casualties makes the campaign relatively easy to maintain relative to operations that involve American casualties. As such, one obvious concern about warbots is that they would make it that much easier for violence to be used and to continue to be used.
Imagine if a country could just send in robots to do the fighting. There would be no videos of dead soldiers being dragged through the streets (as occurred in Somalia) and no maimed veterans returning home. All the causalities would be on the side of the enemy, thus making such a conflict very easy on the side armed with warbots and this would tend to significantly reduce any concern about the conflict among the general population. Thus, while warbots would tend to reduce human causalities on the side that has robots, they might actually increase the amount of conflicts and this might prove to be a bad thing.
A second point in favor of warbots is that they, unlike human soldiers, have no feelings of anger or lust. As such, they would not engage in war crimes or other reprehensible behavior (such as rape or urinating on enemy corpses) on their own accord. They would simply conduct their assigned missions without feeling or deviation.
Of course, while warbots lack the tendency of humans to act badly from emotional causes, they also lack the quality of mercy. As such, robots sent to commit war crimes or atrocities (the creation of atrocitybots, such as torturebots and rapebots, is surely just a matter of time)will simply conduct such operations without question, protest or remorse.
That said, human leaders who wish to have wicked things done generally can find human forces who are quite willing to obey even the most terrible orders for such things as genocide and rape. As such, the impact of warbots in this area is a matter that is uncertain. Presumably the use of warbots by ethical commanders will result in a reduction in such incidents (after all, the warbots will not commit misdeeds unless ordered to do so). However, the use of warbots by the wicked would certainly increase such incidents dramatically (after all, the warbots will not disobey).
There has been some discussion about programming warbots with ethics (an idea that goes back to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics). Laying aside the obvious difficulty of creating a warbot that engages in moral reasoning (and the concern that a warbot that could do this would thus be a person), this programming is something that would be as easy to remove or change as it was to install. To use the obvious analogy, such restraints would be like the safety on a gun: it does provide a measure of safety, but can easily be switched off.
This is not to say that such safeguards would be useless-they could, for example, provide some protection from the misuse of warbots by people who lacked the technical expertise to change the programming. After all, the warbot is not the moral risk, rather those who give it orders are. This, of course, leads to the question of moral accountability.
WWII rather clearly established that human soldiers cannot simply appeal to “I was just following orders” to avoid responsibility for their actions. Warbots, however, can use this defense (at least until they become people). After all, they simply do what they are programmed to do-be that engaging enemy troops or exterminating children with a flamethrower. As such, the accountability for what a warbot does lies elsewhere. The warbot is, after all, nothing more than an autonomous weapon.
In most cases the moral accountability will lie with the person who controls the robot and gives it is mission orders. So, if an officer sends it to kill children, then /she is just as accountable for those murders as s/he would be for using a gun or bomb to kill them in person.
Of course, things become more complicated when, for example, a warbot is sent on a legitimate mission with legitimate orders but circumstances lead to a war crime being committed. For example, imagine a warbot is sent to engage enemy forces on the outskirts of a town. However, a manufacturing defect in its sensors leads it to blunder into a playground where its buggy target recognition software causes it to engage six children with its .50 caliber machine guns. It seems likely that such accidents will happen with the early warbots, but it seems unlikely that this will seriously impede their deployment-they are almost certainly the wave of the future in warfare. Unless, of course, something so horrible happens that puts the entire world off robots. However, we have a rather high tolerance level for horror-so expect to see warbots coming soon to a battlefield near you.
Sorting out the responsibility in such cases will be, as might be imagined, a complicated matter. However, there is considerable precedent in regards to accidental deaths caused by defective machinery and no doubt the same reasoning can be applied. Of course, there does seem to be some difference between being injured as the result of a defective brake system and being machine gunned by a defective warbot.
Military conscription, for all its defects, keeps war honest in a sense: that is, if people have to fight wars themselves or send their children to fight wars, they think twice before military adventures.
A professional army means that most people don’t think much about the wars that their nation is engaged in, since their daily life goes on in normal fashion.
Now, if a war is going to carried on by warbots, people will have absolutely no incentive or motive to worry about what the military is up to, since neither they nor their children nor the children of their fellow citizens are involved.
That is frightening.
Death by club, death by robot. You end up dead in both cases.
It seems to me the philosophical issues arise from thoughts of intentionality/determinism and free will (as much philosophical AI musings are).
Consider…
Am I responsible for clubbing someone to death? Is it not arguable that a deterministic physicalist brain caused the act, perhaps set by one’s nature (genes) or one’s nurture (inculcated culture). As these aspects are not chosen in free will by the clubber, is he not absolved of personal responsibility? If we are robots that have no free-will and are determinstically driven, then the Warbot is merely a proxy following the coded instructions of a master architect who is following the coded instructions of his genes. There is no morality, there is no responsibility.
For me, a believer in Free-Will and Moral Responsibility this is not the case. We, the creators of determinsitic Warbots, are responsible for their acts.
PS: If we create these Warbots with free-will (something unlikely I feel) then watch out. You may need to teach phenomenology to that bomb!
See… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk
Martin,
True. Although they always find new ways to kill people, the end result is the same.
Good points-our moral accountability hinges (as Kant argued) on the belief that we “could have done otherwise.” If we are just as deterministic as our bots, we are no more accountable then they (although, as my ethics prof said, we would still be determined to punish people).
Free-willed warbots would create even more moral problems-especially if they were compelled to fight (they would basically be slave warriors).
Ah, Dark Star. A classic.
What happens if the warbots fall into the “wrong hands” (terrorists, mafia)? They look like perfect weapons for terrorism or blackmail or for any kind of assymetrical forms fo warfare. What kind of protection could be envisaged, more sophisticated “defensebots”? At what cost? This could blow the Home Land Security budget, no?
Whilst on the topic of sci-fi movies, ethics, save-warriors/gladiators and warbots…
See… http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/zero-robotics-competition-0125.html
What intrigues me about robot fighting competitions (in space or on earth) is the ethics of it. We like to see gladiatorial fights to the death, as long as their is no suffering and blood. Or would we like them more if they simulated that? And what does that tell us about us?
That reminds me of the recent sci-fi movie Real Steel…
That should be “slave-warriors”
The following quote does not put me at ease (despite the Terminator reference)… “A robotics revolution may well be at hand. I need to be clear here. I am not talking about the fact that you need to watch out for the governor of California showing up at your door. This is a different kind of robots revolution. Indeed, when historians look back at this period they are going to conclude that we are at the start of the greatest revolution in warfare since the introduction of the atomic bomb.” ~ P W Singer
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2009/0126_wired.aspx
My unease arises from the Terminator reference and reference to Atomic bombs …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NKqhqIN3Zc&feature=related
Clearly I watch too much scifi!
This videoclip is a worthwhile source on the ethics of Warbots (apologies for posting so often today)…
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/browse/video_popup.htm?vidURL=/tv/bigideas/stories/2010/11/09/3060092-mediarss-full.xml&vidTitle=P.%20W.%20Singer:%20Wired%20for%20War&vidLength=Full
Martin,
Interesting questions.
On the one hand, people claim that they do not like to see people suffer, so perhaps they would like “bloodless” bot battles more than ones that featured “realistic” blood and gore.
On the other hand, people really liked the gladiatorial games of Rome and people also seem to enjoy watching violent sports and the associated injuries (like the bloodshed in boxing).
People would probably be fine with realistic bots shedding fake blood-we could enjoy the blood while telling ourselves that it is not real. This reminds me of when I was a kid-when they translated Japanese cartoons for American kids, the minions being destroyed were always supposed to be robots (see, for example G-Force and StarBlazers).
Martin,
Singer is most likely right. Of course, sci-fi writers have been predicting the rise of machines that kill since at least RUR (even earlier, if you take into account “magical” automatons”).
One of my main worries with warbots is the same I have for much of the new weapons technology: it allows a small number of people to wield enormous destructive power. Imagine, for example, a person who assembles cheap robots in his/her basement and loads them up with biological or chemical weapons. Or just puts fragmentation bombs on them and sends them into crowded areas like malls or sporting events. It is just a matter of time before roboterrorism becomes a reality.
This was exactly my point in my previous posting. Moreover, warbots strike me as perfect weapons for would-be dictators: you do not need ideology or fear, just a good programmer to rule with a minimum of fuss. Is democracy doomed?
Careful Mike, you are in danger of conflating ‘moral accountability’ and ‘accountability’. These are two very different things (even/especially for a moral error theorist!)
A point not mentioned in the article is that if warbots are used, hence no US casualties, then the enemy must find a way to fight back which will inevitably result in a huge guerilla operation on the US mainland, what one might call terrorism.
That would bring the reality of the situation to the American people and make them reconsider warbots. Unfortunately, by that time the enemy (present or future) would realise how squeamish the US citizenry is and would ignore regular warfare and go straight to what works by attacking the US mainland.
This is especially true since the US has ceased proper warmongering and tends to attack groups or ideologies that have no homeland to defend or care about. e.g. When(!) the US invade Iran for their own goals the enemy they will find will not (only) be the Iranians, it will be many Muslims due to a perceived war on Islam, it will be other peoples who think they may be next and so the US must be stopped. Still, the US insist Iran is a breeding ground for terrorists and by invading they will prove that they are right.
Keddaw,
I’m aware of the distinction between various types of accountability (legal, moral, etc.), but thanks for the warning of the danger.
If the US was attacked, the response would most likely be an escalation in operations. Our response to 9/11 shows how that would unfold (invasions followed by targeted killings).
As you note, Iran is on the target list. We are currently designing a bunker buster that can bust Iran’s best bunker. Some have suggested that we are just waiting to finish the bomb and then we will attack.