‘Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands’
This is an excerpt from a Fox news story I came across on unmanned military fighting machines.
I’m currently making my way through the 112 page document Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design (link to pdf) which spurred the Fox story.
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I had no idea there were government mandates for unmanned military aircraft/vehicles:
Two key Congressional mandates are driving the use of military robotics: by 2010, one‐third of all operational deep‐strike aircraft must be unmanned, and by 2015, one‐third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned [National Defense Authorization Act, 2000].
Glad to see this in there…
…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 large programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways. (And even straightforward, simple rules such as Asimov’s Laws of Robotics can create unexpected dilemmas [e.g., Asimov, 1950].) Furthermore, increasing complexity may lead to emergent behaviors, i.e., behaviors not programmed but arising out of sheer complexity [e.g., Kurzweil, 1999, 2005].
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Here are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics for reference:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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I will probably blog a little more about this paper downstream.
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