 have flown nearly half a million combined hours in Iraq and Afghanistan. )
WHERE'S THE PILOT? Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have flown nearly half a million combined hours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Image: Pennsylvania Army National Guard
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The increasing deployment of gun-toting robots by the U.S. military and other armed forces around the world could end up endangering civilian lives and giving terrorists new ideas, warns a U.K. robotics professor.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has outlined plans to ramp up the use of remotely controlled robotic vehicles on land, undersea and in the air. The goal is to field increasingly autonomous robots—without a human controller—to dispose of explosives, stand guard and spot targets to attack. Nations such as South Korea and the Republic of South Africa have also begun adopting armed robotic systems.
The prospect of armed, autonomous robots is enough to rattle Noel Sharkey, professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, England. "One of the fundamental laws of war is being able to discriminate real combatants and noncombatants," he says. "I can see no way that autonomous robots can deliver this for us." Even today's unmanned air and ground vehicles could do harm, he cautions, by teaching insurgents new ways to mount devastating attacks from a safe distance.
But aside from the technological challenges to developing autonomous weapons, it remains unclear how quickly military brass would adopt a high-tech approach that takes soldiers out of the equation or if terrorists would be interested in weapons that might not inflict as many casualties as traditional attacks.
Congress in 2001 mandated that one third of military ground vehicles must be unmanned by 2015. According to the DoD report, "Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032," the Pentagon plans to spend $4 billion by 2010 on unmanned systems technology, with an eye toward increasing autonomy to free up troops that would otherwise have to monitor the robots closely.
An autonomous Chevy Tahoe successfully navigated a 60-mile (96-kilometer) urban setting this past November in four hours to win the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's 2007 Urban Challenge. "It is quite realistic," Sharkey says, "to have autonomous vehicles that are not monitored—to take supplies and navigate from place to place."
Giving them license to kill would be another matter. Despite decades of research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), computers remain unable to make simple visual discriminations such as picking a cow out of a barnyard scene. Robotic systems would be hard-pressed to tell friend from foe even in ideal conditions, let alone amid the smoke and confusion of battle, Sharkey says.
Mindful of these limitations, Sharkey, who moonlights as a judge in televised robot contests such as BBC Two's Robot Wars series, proposes a global ban on autonomous weapons until they can comply with international rules of war prohibiting the use of force against noncombatants.
The U.S. armed forces currently have more than 4,000 robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) such as Predator air drones, used for reconnaissance and missile strikes, along with smaller, hand-held fliers have logged more than 400,000 hours of flight time, according to the DoD report.
The report says that robotic ground vehicles, including the Talon, a miniature treaded tank in operation since 2000, have disposed of thousands of improvised explosive devices (IED) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foster–Miller, Inc., the Waltham, Mass.–based manufacturer of the Talon, says that three armed units, called Talon–SWORDS (for special weapons observation reconnaissance detection systems), rolled into Iraq equipped with machine guns last year.
Sharkey's fear is that unmanned technology could fall into the wrong hands. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Islamic paramilitary group, reportedly flew UAVs (likely supplied by Iran) across the Israeli border in 2004 and 2006. He says it would be relatively easy for terrorist or insurgent groups to mount explosives on remote-controlled cars or airplanes.
Dennis Gormley, a senior fellow at The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies's Washington, D.C., office and a specialist in missile systems, says that UAV technology in particular raises ethical issues, because it gives combat planners the opportunity to make lightning-quick strikes that were previously impossible. In one well-known example, the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002 killed six suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen by launching Hellfire missiles at their car from a hovering Predator.
But Gormley says that worries over robots-run-amok ignore the realities of military and terrorist decision making. He notes that Air Force officials in particular tend to drag their heels on technologies that might make their pilots appear obsolete.
He says that would-be terrorists could potentially deliver up to several hundred pounds of explosives by converting a build-it-yourself airplane into a UAV, but adds that the conversion would require several years of technically challenging work. "Frankly," he says, "I think that's beyond the capacity of any terrorist group."
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16 Comments
Add CommentWhile I applaud Dr. Sharkey's intent, I must question his method. What will be the effect of banning? This will slow research and development. The problem with that is that it means that anti-robot defenses will also be slowed. But, right now, a terrorist could buy a remote control aircraft, put plastic explosive and buckshot in it, and fly it somewhere. That means that banning will make the world less safe for civilians rather than more safe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is another problem. Once war doesn't seem to involve human casualties, it may be seen as a more morally acceptable approach to international problems. But even if all of the "soldiers" are robots, people will still get hurt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo much for "What if they had a war and nobody showed?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe main moral objection to war is human casualties. Once they are taken out of the equation, there is no longer any basis for objection, so if it happens more often, there's no problem.
Diplomacy is SUPPOSED to be where parties with differences come to an agreement that is mutually acceptable. However, it almost always ends up being a situation where nobody is happy.
As much as it pains the intelligensia, war can never be eliminated, so long as there are people who only understand the pointy end of a stick.
The example of the CIA killing six suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen should be balanced by the instance where the CIA used a Predator and Hellfires to kill a man in Afghanistan that they thought was Osama bin Laden, and it turned out to just be a tall sheep-herder.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you want to bring up the accidental killing of a shepherd, then that should be balanced against all the examples of human friendly fire killing our own people, and humans bombing or shelling cities and towns killing non-combatants. Come on. Death is death, whether it comes by robot or by human controlled machinery.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo far, the evidence is that robots are much more precise and so there is far less collateral damage. What do people think a cruise missile is? It's a robot in every sense of the word.
The more I think about it, the sillier this article gets.
I am certainly not worried about robotic weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. Dedicated followers are cheaper and work better.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat I really fear is one of our own constructions running amok, and having to explain it to the world community.
It's interesting that he is advocating a ban on autonomous battlefield robots, but the robots mentioned are all just remote-controlled (the Predator has some autonomous ability, but a human controls it to fire missiles. The SWORDS is completely radio controlled.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe most advanced and autonomous military robots are cruise missiles, as was already mentioned. So the effect of such a ban would be to eliminate all guided missiles, which have been in use since the 50's, while only banning hypothetical future ground robots.
It seems like the only substantive part of what he's saying is that computer vision isn't advanced enough to make friend/foe decisions on humans, but world militaries seem to already understand that limitation. As for giving terrorists ideas, they've been launching homemade rockets into Israel for years; I think they already have the idea of unmanned long-range attacks regardless of what we do.
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Edited by dreadengineer at 03/01/2008 7:39 PM
The article highlights the ethical dilemmas associated with any new technology that has the potential of turning into a Frankenstein. The history of the development of technologies shows that initially the concerned people raise objections with regard to the possible misuse. But those who invent and those who use these technologies point to the potential advantages. Slowly the objectors, who are generally powerless, fall silent. The technology is accepted. This has happened with biotechnolgy, nuclear technology and others technologies. International regulations prove to be ineffective. Moreover, international regimes are quite often discriminatory and are tilted against those who do not have such technologies. NPT is a classical example of discriminatory international regimes. We should be prepared for the misuse of this newly invented technology by non state actors who, by defintion,fall outside any regulations and controls.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will be making an announcement, concerning new information related to this issue, within a week on my blog space here at sciam.com. Stay tuned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease note that the best "killer robot" mentioned in the comments, the cruise missile, only uses artificial intelligence to correct a predefined course. It does not patrol, or decide if and what to attack. In fact, it cannot find a moving target that might not fit the pre-programmed photo.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's look at a list of real "smart weapons" and their track record:
- anti-missile missiles: only slightly better than nothing at all.
- SAMs: dangerous but far from failsafe, vulnerable to many countermeasures.
- torpedoes: can be fooled into missing a 150 meter submarine that moves at less than 60 kilometers per hour.
And those are "simple" targets, clearly distinguishable from the huge amount of empty space surrounding them.
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Edited by avillarrealpouw at 03/04/2008 2:58 PM
We should not develop this technology because it might give terrorists ideas? If everybody throughout history took this stance, the world would be much differant than it is today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn resume, what robots need to get their license to kill are three things, one, an algorithm to decide who is to be shot at, which has been handled on one too many science fiction novels with different outcomes and limitations, like having a beating heart and lacking a valid ID tag, as in second variety, a wait until shot at, as in the day the earth stood still, a perimeter to cross, or some other dumb thing to do for a civilian, (B movie about a shopping mall), or a highly complex visual discrimination algorithm, based on clues like race, age, way of walking, accesory items (is that an AK74 or a Prada bag?) which might make a good racist droid but won't work for civilians against moles, second, a way to stop the attack, which again can be a dumb criterion like "get only the attacker", or "shot all your clip", a command from a friendly "the ID tagged guy says stop", or a mixture of both, and third, a hack proofing mechanism (an explosive device designed to destroy the unit in case of tampering would be an example), of course, you could build something that goes on dangerous territory only (hence cheap computer power, dumbest combat algo and a recorded Austrian accented "hasta la vista baby!" thing), and release it only on open war areas, to be deactivated later by means of a M-16 shooting DU bullets. (oh my god!, it's going to that hospital!)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnice ......
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI really have no idea why he says that autonomous military robots are bad. Firstly, they are very rarely, if EVER deployed in areas populated by civilians. Second, the AI may be clunky, but its the human on the other end who pulls the trigger, not the robot. Thirdly, the advances in robotics that the military makes are essential to industry. For God's sake, I'm only 14 and I'm smart enough to know this! And the dudes a frickin' robotics professor!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think ur site is shit and lacks in information and ur statistics are snoffle and uy should pay me 1 million dollars and send me all ur robots!!! The reason why u should is because im awesome and im going to bomb you if u dont :D
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIm so cereal!!!!!!!! >:Z
Pfft. The real excitement will come when Artificial Intelligence is far enough along that it gets online, reads and comprehends all we have written, about the dangerous world and [pick a motive], signs up for online college courses, learns engineering, physics, and starts designing, hacks into and takes over an automated production facilities to machine a physical extension of itself... Eventually, robots creating robots will make you forget all about the big scary military creating robots.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWork is being done in several CAD companies to increase the role of AI in their design & engineering software.
Just up the road, the HAAS CNC machining plant is a fully automated, lights-out plant, which churns out more CNC machines all day long.
I claim movie rights!