'Warrior code' for fighting robots of the future
Monday February 16 2009
Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict "warrior code" or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.
The stark warning -- which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters -- is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy's hi-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.
The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over human soldiers.
"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said.
Testing
The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programmes included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire programme. Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programmes would interact without extensive testing in the field -- an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.
The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of "learning" the rights and wrongs of warfare.
The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the "rush to market" and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.
A simple ethical code along the lines of the "Three Laws of Robotics" postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.
Dr Lin said: "We are going to need a warrior code." (© The Times, London)
- Leo Lewis in California
