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A Code of Ethics for Robot Soldiers?

by Terrence O'Brien on May 20, 2009 at 03:12 PM

A Code of Ethics for Robot Soldiers?
Currently all battlefield robots have humans at the controls -- be they 100 yards away, or across the globe. But military machines are becoming more advanced and soon could be making decisions on when to fire and where to bomb, without human input.

In anticipation of that day, Professor Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is developing software to govern the behavior of military robots as they become more advanced and autonomous. But we say, skip the exercise and leave battlefield decisions to the soft, fleshy kind of soldiers.


It's not that we have anything against artificial intelligence, but we don't think it's ready (and may never be ready) to make decisions of life and death. Who is responsible for the actions of the robot if there isn't a human at the controls? What happens if, thanks to an error in programing or a hardware failure, a drone opens fire on civilians, or destroys a culturally sensitive building such as a mosque or temple?

War is too serious a matter to leave in the hands of an unmanned computer. We can barely get Windows Vista to behave properly, and our attempts at taking humans out of the equation have already resulted in one tragic loss of life.

Perhaps we'd be better off taking a page from a piece of classic Sci-Fi, the Three Laws of Robotics penned by Isaac Asimov and used throughout his books, including 'I, Robot.'

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

[From: MSNBC]

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, ArtificialIntelligence, military, robot, robots, top, war, weapons

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