Two comments, one personal, one theoretical.Personally, as a geek and physics major turned military officer, specifically spending my last 18 months in the fleet doing force protection planning and ops,now a father, 3rd year med student, and homeowner in New Orleans, I can't conceive of a war these warbots could win. They can only start and continue violence. They can't build homes, mend communities, teach children or care for the sick and injured. They can't stock shelves or forgive debts. These war bots appeal to young men who have not yet faced physical adversity &military & political leaders too far removed and too surrounded by military contractors. Would you want your family to face these machines? I disagree with the claim that force protection is a valid basis for bots. Thebots don'tprotect the troops. They continue violencethey can't stop. Every bomb dropped leaves more work for soldiers on the ground and increases the hostility of the local population toward those troops. Those troops are your friends, neighbors, sons and daughters.
If code is law, what codable theoretical concept can society use to stop young men and the leaders of the military-industrial complex from killing us all in a scorched earth search for a technological solution to war? The concern most have expressed here boils down to moral hazard, the same concept employed to curb bailouts of housing speculators and big companies. In both the bot and bailout cases, moral hazard has been gradually removed from the decision-making process. In finance, computing power, a credible objective(profit), gimicks, and the failure of regulators to keep pace with their charges, made it possible for the actors to get into the problems they now face. In the military-industrial complex the case is more extreme:massive computing power, a credible objective (less danger to our troops (they thought)), and a complete abdication of regulatory responsibility, and exceptionally simple regulatory basis (can't get much simpler than the five bases of jus ad bellum). How to put lot more moral hazard back into the equations?
I know all of the arguments. Saving American lives etc. They sound good. I love robotics but I still recoil at the thought of first-world technological giants deploying semi-autonomous, or ever fully autonomous machines to kill vastly outmatched humans in third world nations at no risk to themselves. It just begs for abuse. If not now, certainly in the future.
I understand your concerns but I'm also generally against holding back technological progress as a way to slow down the roadmap to the inevitable bad things that will result alongside the good ones.
I really am torn by technology like this. On the one hand, force protection is the responsibility of any commander, and anything that contributes to that mission is a valuable asset.
But on the other, if we can go to war with no risk to ourselves, can we also resist the temptation to do so on the slightest pretext?
Assymetric warfare is such that you are mainly trying to not kill civilians. A teleoperated bot that doesn't fear for its life is better suited to storm a city building by building.
Symmetric warfare will always include nukes. There is a huge risk, regardless of the boots/bots ratio on the ground.
Well no, asymmetric warfare is any warfare where the two parties differ substantially in strength. In Iraq at the moment, for instance, we're trying to kill the enemy while the enemy doesn't seem to care whether they kill our soldiers or random civilians, but it would remain asymmetric even if the enemy would be so kind as to restrict themselves to trying to kill our soldiers.
Unless you're saying that the enemy in Iraq counts as "civilians" because they're not part of any proper and recognized army, but that's a rather point-missing definition of "civilian", since the defining characteristic of a civilian is whether they're engaging in combat.
It is not such a stretch to envision a world in which we have flocks of these circling endlessly over "enemy" population centres waiting targets of opportunity. Our own people barely even need to be aware that we're doing it, no body bags coming home, no loved-ones overseas for years, it will no more make it to the news than when a Tomahawk is fired now.
That is a terror weapon, in the most literal sense.
That being said, I'd prefer this scenario to the present one with body bags coming home. That is, as long as I'm still living in the U.S., away from the perpetually aloft drones.
As the article pointed out, the adoption of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is much smaller until now than that of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
If you are interested in UGVs in the military, check out the company iRobot. I listened to a recent webcasted analyst conference from them and they basically think that 2008 is an "inflection year" for UGVs - it's the first year they sell their robots not only to specialist teams (mainly explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams) but to the infantry, which is a much larger market. In September, they await a decision if the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV), a new smaller robot part of the Future Combat Systems, will be accelerated (earlier it was planned to start production in 2013-2015).
The webcast I'm referring to is here (you don't have to fill out the form, just press 'Access Event'. The presentation of the military division is in the second half of the presentation, but it's also pretty interesting to just watch the slides (the presentation of the military division starts at slide 93)):
http://investors.irobot.com/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=53016
At some point robots will be mainly designed to fight other robots rather than humans. Which is a welcome development, if indeed humans will be allowed only to watch the fight from the sidelines.
the reason warbots bother me is that people (including the decision makers) haven't seemed to figure out what exactly they're trying to accomplish when they go to war. What is the U.S.'s goal in Iraq? With no clearly defined goal, how do we know when the war is over?
If code is law, what codable theoretical concept can society use to stop young men and the leaders of the military-industrial complex from killing us all in a scorched earth search for a technological solution to war? The concern most have expressed here boils down to moral hazard, the same concept employed to curb bailouts of housing speculators and big companies. In both the bot and bailout cases, moral hazard has been gradually removed from the decision-making process. In finance, computing power, a credible objective(profit), gimicks, and the failure of regulators to keep pace with their charges, made it possible for the actors to get into the problems they now face. In the military-industrial complex the case is more extreme:massive computing power, a credible objective (less danger to our troops (they thought)), and a complete abdication of regulatory responsibility, and exceptionally simple regulatory basis (can't get much simpler than the five bases of jus ad bellum). How to put lot more moral hazard back into the equations?