xcited for the new Terminator movie? You may be surprised to learn that the self-aware killing machines that define this franchise loom far closer than most would think.
Traditionally, science fiction has imagined artificial intelligence as it was first set out by author Isaac Asimov. Anything but killing machines, robots appeared in his novels as pseudo-life forms created to serve man peacefully, bound by a duty to help humans, never to harm them. Asimov’s interest lay in exploring how these rules could become contradictory, and how strict adherence to them might force robots to abandon them altogether. In reality, such philosophical worries about how machines might “self-contradict” are moot. Today’s robots have no “golden rules.” Far from it, the very point of our most advanced creations has thus far been to kill humans; A.I. has shied far from such an angsty, soliptic vision. Really, Terminator is far closer to reality than Asimov’s vision of what the future might look like.
The media has been fastidious in its coverage of the Predator drones being used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where they are deployed to kill suspected terrorists. What has received less attention, however, is the extent to which all three branches of the military have become more reliant on robots and artificial intelligence.
Take the Air Force for instance. Despite much resistance from its old guard, this branch of the service is quickly becoming unmanned. Even as they defend the instincts and judgment of human pilots, Air Force officials have been forced to defend the Air Force’s relevance by highlighting its heavy reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). And with the advent of the unheralded “Predator B” fighters (also known as “Reapers”), the Air Force has moved beyond deploying simple reconnaissance craft towards a reliance on full-blown robotic fighters. One study published in IEEE (a trade publication for engineers) has even detailed how robotic fighters can now fly as reliable wingmen to human pilots. It won’t be too long until we have fighters that can operate without a human counterpart.
Beyond the robotization of current weaponry, there has been a dramatic paradigm shift in how we understand and create weapons. Take, for example, the U.S. Marine Corps’ tests of a space-plane “mothership”—originally conceived as a huge, always-flying plane capable of launching spacecraft into orbit. The original concept never worked because the resulting blob of a plane could not be flown by any trained pilot.
Now, however, the concept has been revisited, and the result is a drone mothership capable of launching smaller drone fighters or robotic ground forces (unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs) from the air. Similar concepts are being adopted by the U.S. and British Navies, both of which are now developing similar water-based motherships that carry unmanned vehicles—basically, small, deadly robotic submarines and surface ships. Many defense analysts argue that carrier technology will soon become a relic of the past, unwelcome news, one would expect, for China, India, and the other developing countries struggling to put together fleets of their own. What good would a large, slow, and extremely expensive target do against planes capable of flying at speeds that would kill any normal human being? Could such a fleet defend against sea-based drones that can approach and destroy faster than they can be detected and stopped?
Despite these startling advances in air and sea technology, however, the most troubling robotization research has thus far been done by the United States Army. In simple terms: we are very close to developing machines that fight without human guidance, machines that will no longer require a human finger, not even a remote one, to pull the trigger. But in the messy business of ground combat, especially in our new world of low-intensity guerilla and urban warfare, is this acceptable? Here, the ethical questions are too many. You’re not likely to have civilian fighter jets, nor are you likely to have civilian aircraft carriers or warships. You are, however, likely to have civilian people. It’s far easier for Air Force and Navy drones to identify what they should be killing than it is for Army ones.
In ground warfare, for instance, how will a robot distinguish between an armed militant and a scared child—and how will such a thing cull intimate emotional, even physical, detail from a situation? How can we program a robot to identify real versus feigned surrender? Can a robot read the emotions of an enemy? Can it recognize a scared son/daughter/husband/brother/sister who could never pull the trigger of his or her AK-47? Soldiers themselves, in the heat and confusion of war, are often not able to make these distinctions. How could a robot ever do so?
With these concerns in mind, the U.S. Army is drafting a whitepaper that will outline a kind of robot code of conduct. The military is still not comfortable—rightly so—with the idea that autonomous robots will be capable of killing other humans. It should be uncomfortable at the very least. While the world of Terminator may not come to pass anytime soon, the idea that humans might be removed entirely from combat raises difficult ethical issues. If we claim to be fighting just wars, to be sacrificing for our causes and ideals, how can we simply remove “sacrifice” from our side of the equation? What necessary, albeit tortured, checks on war making would we sacrifice were it to no longer entail the loss of soldiers’ lives?
Running headlong into mechanized warfare might be our best choice militarily, but it’s anything but clear that it’s our most moral one. Forgetting, for a moment, the intrinsic danger associated with autonomous killing machines, we have to look at the broader consequences of dehumanizing warfare, especially if it is a tool available only to the powerful. Implicated here is the valuation of our citizens’ lives over the lives of the people we fight, not to mention the trivialization of war. If we don’t risk our own life and limb, after all, what’s to stop us from starting all sorts of wars for trivial reasons? Forget SKYNET, cylons, and robotic revolution—these are the concerns that will define our generation’s tortured relationship with modern warfare. It would seem Pandora’s Box has been opened all over again.
