[Robotgroup] Article: "Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots"

[Vern Graner]

 From this link:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/ethics_of_auton.html

Comes this article:

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January 28, 2008
Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots

Ronald C. Arkin, "Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a 
Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture," Technical Report 
GIT-GVU-07011. Fascinating (and long: 117-page) paper on ethical 
implications of robots in war.

Summary, Conclusions, and Future Work

This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, 
representational requirements, architectural design criteria, 
recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an 
autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of 
lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary 
and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed 
as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal 
remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a 
manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that 
not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in 
their ethical capacity.

It is too early to tell whether this venture will be successful. There 
are daunting problems remaining:

* The transformation of International Protocols and battlefield ethics 
into machine usable representations and real-time reasoning capabilities 
for bounded morality using modal logics.

* Mechanisms to ensure that the design of intelligent behaviors only 
provide responses within rigorously defined ethical boundaries.

* The creation of techniques to permit the adaptation of an ethical 
constraint set and underlying behavioral control parameters that will 
ensure moral performance, should those norms be violated in any way, 
involving reflective and affective processing.

* A means to make responsibility assignment clear and explicit for all 
concerned parties regarding the deployment of a machine with a lethal 
potential on its mission.

Over the next two years, this architecture will be slowly fleshed out in 
the context of the specific test scenarios outlined in this article. 
Hopefully the goals of this effort, will fuel other scientists’ interest 
to assist in ensuring that the machines that we as roboticists create 
fit within international and societal expectations and requirements.

My personal hope would be that they will never be needed in the present 
or the future. But mankind’s tendency toward war seems overwhelming and 
inevitable. At the very least, if we can reduce civilian casualties 
according to what the Geneva Conventions have promoted and the Just War 
tradition subscribes to, the result will have been a humanitarian 
effort, even while staring directly at the face of war.
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PDF referenced can be found here:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online-publications/formalizationv35.pdf

in case the above is broken:

http://tinyurl.com/2g69vj

Vern

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