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

[john at cozmicfunk.com]

I hope you are being sarcastic, I see nothing cool about terminators 
running killing everyone.
JPF

Andre Lamothe wrote:
> Pretty cool, the foundations of skynet are now forming :)
>
> Andre'
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Vern Graner" <vern at txis.com>
> To: "'The Robot Group Mailing List'" <robotgroup at puremagic.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 3:29 PM
> Subject: [Robotgroup] Article: "Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots"
>
>
> >From this link:
>
> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/ethics_of_auton.html
>
> Comes this article:
>
> --------------------------- CLIP ----------------------------
> 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.
> -------------------------- /CLIP ----------------------------
>
> 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
>
>