To kill, or not to kill, that is the question Military Robots may be deciding for themselves in future military conflicts.
At the present time unmanned "military rolling robots," and "flying drones" are under the control of a human counter part.
But in the future this may not always be the case.
Next generation unmanned military equipment may not have a human in the
equation at all. The decision to shot, or bomb, may be made by the
unmanned vehicle it self.
Professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, Ronald Arkin, is
just beginning the process for developing what he calls an "ethical
governor." It will be a combination of software and hardware that will
tell a robot when, and at what to fire. He is currently writing a book
on the subject that has come out this month. The book is called
"Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots"
His argument is that military robots can perform "more ethically", on
the battlefield, with this new programing and hardware, than human
soldiers. Arikin says "Ultimately these systems could have more
information to make wiser decisions than a human could make." and that
Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We
want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives."
Weapons systems like
iRobot's SWORDS or
QinetiQ's MAARS
robots currently deployed in Afghanistan and Pakistan still have a
human making the decisions. And this won't change anytime soon as
Arkin's ethical govenor is at this point "...designed for a more
traditional war where civilians have evacuated the war zone and anyone
pointing a weapon at U.S. troops can be considered a target."
Arkin has the arduous task of converting to code some 150 years of
military law into instruction robots can use to use to make these
lethal decisions. He does not believe this is as hard a task as making
the programing for other types of artificial intelligence. 150 years of
wars of law make it clear what is acceptable and what is not, according
to Arkin. He said "We tell soldiers what is right and wrong...We don't
allow soldiers to develop ethics on their own."