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

[Andre Lamothe]

Isn't that obvious? Its a joke, lighten up. Go have a snapple and watch an 
episode of "Friends". When a person is saying "wouldn't it be fun if living 
machines killed my friends, family, and exterminated everyone on the planet" 
and you think they are serious, maybe its time you take a vacation?

So my counter question... are you serious about asking me if I am serious?

Hint: -- that is more humor --  ;)

Andre'

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <john at cozmicfunk.com>
To: "The Robot Group Mailing List" <robotgroup at puremagic.com>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Robotgroup] Article: "Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots"


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
>
>

_______________________________________________
Robotgroup mailing list
Robotgroup at puremagic.com
http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/robotgroup