[Synapse elist] Warbots

[Paul Brown]

An interesting and pertinent item.  I'm amused that the article  
suggests the possibility of "committing war crimes" as the US has  
scant regard for this - they don't recognise the international war  
crimes tribunal and I believe they have a standing order that the USA  
will assume a position of being at war with the Netherlands if any US  
national ever appears before the tribunal (maybe they will extend  
this to include AIs and robots :).

A more likely concern is "friendly fire" especially if the friends  
were other US participants and not just cannon fodder of other  
nationalities.

Back in the Cold War period US researchers made a learning system  
that appeared to be able to distinguish between American and Soviet  
tanks.  This was obviously a great step towards autonomous weapons  
and the researchers were about to pop the corks on the champagne when  
someone pointed out that all the pictures of American tanks had been  
taken on sunny clear days and all the images of Soviet ones were in  
overcast conditions.  What the system had learned was to distinguish  
between clear and overcast skies.  This illustrates the kind of  
problems that we face in implementing autonomous bottom-up systems in  
real-world applications.  A major problem with bottom-up systems is  
that we rarely understand exactly how they work (this in itself is a  
major research area).  All we have is a set of pragmatics that show  
that they have worked so far in all the test situations they have  
encountered (and this is a long way from the dirty, noisy real world  
- especially of a battlefield).

But back to the issue -  ethics and AI is an interesting area.  At  
Sussex our ethics group have been looking at some interesting topics  
like the increasing use of human beings to do often unpaid and menial  
work that computational systems find difficult; rights for autonomous  
agents; liability of autonomous agents and issues like the growing  
relationship between the online game America's Army and the real  
American Army with issues like the covert monitoring, training and  
recruitment of people (including children) for the American war  
effort.  See http://www.americasarmy.com/

The issue Vicki raises - of liability - is similar to the authorship  
issue in the robot art debate.  If an autonomous robot creates an  
artwork who claims authorship - the robot or the team that created  
the robot?  Also parallels in the human domain where groups concerned  
with gun crime tried to take the weapons manufacturers to court  
accusing them of shared liability when their products were used for  
crime.  The gun industry was protected by Bush in 2005 http:// 
www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/21/news/guns.php  (and read down the  
page for a related tort measure "the so-called cheeseburger bill,  
which would protect the restaurant industry from obesity-related  
lawsuits").

One of the Sussex researchers is Blay Whitby (who is also Ethics  
Officer for Anna Dumitriu's "Institute for Unnecessary Research" -  
http://www.unnecessaryresearch.org/ ).  His website is a little out  
of date - http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/blayw/ - but see - "How to  
Avoid a Robot Takeover" at  http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/ 
blayw/BlayAISB00.html for one paper of possible interest.

Paul

On 12 Apr 2008, at 08:39, Vicki wrote:
> Hello all
>
> Whilst not engaging with the issues raised so far, I thought the  
> following
> story raises some interesting questions.. What happens when the  
> holy grail
> of robotic autonomy is achieved and deployed towards political and
> militaristic ends... Or, put another way: can robots commit war  
> crimes?
>
> Cheers
> Vicki
>
>
> http://www.dailytech.com/Iraqi+War+Robots+Recalled+Following 
> +Alarming+Behavi
> or/article11456.htm
>
> FIRST GENERATION WARBOTS DEPLOYED IN IRAQ RECALLED AFTER A WAVE OF
> DISOBEDIENCE AGAINST THEIR HUMAN OPERATORS
>
> Just a few weeks back there was a spirited debate over the ethics of
> deploying war robots in Iraq.  The machine gun carrying remote- 
> controlled
> killing machines, TALON SWORDS robots, produced by the Army, were  
> among the
> various robotic soldiers being experimentally deployed in Iraq.
>
> Their deployment lead a major anti-landmine nonprofit organization to
> campaign against the deployment of the machines.  The protests were  
> fueled
> by a discussion with a leading roboticist, Chris Elliot, who  
> proposed that
> increasingly intelligent robots might be capable of committing war  
> crimes.
>
> ...[more]...
>
>
>
>
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====
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Visiting Professor - Sussex University
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