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Search: battlefield robots

22 May

(Last post on battlefield robots.) An issue of battlefield robots that has not received, so far as I can tell, sufficient attention is what happens when battlefield robots are deployed against the US. The assumption seems to be that robots are going to be so complicated and expensive that only the US, and maybe a handful of others, such as Japan, will be able to deploy and maintain them. What happens if that is wishful thinking? What happens instead if it turns out that once the investment in R&D is...
22.05.08 | |

22 May

(I fear wearing out my welcome at Opinio Juris and wearing out its readers’ patience with so many posts on battlefield robots. So I will post this and one more short one, and then move on to some other topics.) Among the reasons why the US military seeks to develop battlefield robots are (as noted in my first post on robots): force multipliers, force protection, and a technological counter to violations of the laws of war by the other side. By that last, I mean that the other side fights...
22.05.08 | |

06 Oct

Professor Charli Carpenter (of UMass Amherst Political Science Department) and I had a lovely conversation over the weekend about battlefield robots. Well, actually it was an interview for a project of hers, so she let me do pretty much all the talking. She has now posted some thoughts of her own, in highly interesting, highly recommended (for that small chunk of the world interested in battlefield robotics and the law and ethics of war, anyway) posts at two different blog sites. (I manage to mix up the two posts some...
06.10.08 | |

04 Jan

John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org website, has a provocative op-ed in today’s Washington Post (January 4, 2009, B3) arguing that the evolution of battlefield robots might mean robots as the soldiers that do the killing on future battlefields: Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.” Let us dwell on “unsympathetic.” These killers will be utterly without remorse or...
04.01.09 | |

08 Mar

under review are: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century By PW Singer Penguin Press $29.95 512 pages War Bots: How US Military Robots Are Transforming War in Iraq Afghanistan, and the Future By David Axe Nimble Books $28.36 88 pages Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong By Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen OUP £15.99 288 pages This essay, in keeping with the third book, is primarily about the question of robotic autonomy – autonomous systems for use of force by a robot. That...
08.03.09 | |

20 May

...machine-applicable language. Is there anything different about it being a machine? Or is the problem of autonomous battlefield robots, as a matter of law and ethics, simply one of translation – to try and achieve how the ideal soldier would behave? These are some of the questions I want to take up later this week about genuinely autonomous battlefield robots. Meanwhile, if you would like some further reading, some of the most fascinating work in the area of ethics and law applied to autonomous battlefield robots is being done by...
20.05.08 | |

05 Feb

Chris mentioned earlier the NPR interview with Brookings Institution scholar PW Singer on his new book, Wired for War. I am naturally reading the book as we speak, but for those wanting a useful, clear, short take from Singer himself, check out the Winter 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, and Singer’s cover article, “Robots at War: The New Battlefield.” (The whole article appears to be available at the link. Hooray! I’ll be commenting on the article in an invited set of letters that the WQ will publish in the...
05.02.09 | |

21 Aug

The battlefield robots we have mostly discussed here at Opinio Juris are those that are about remote control – realtime control by a human operator who is not actually in the cockpit of the Predator, for example. We’ve talked somewhat about autonomy issues and robots – battlefield robots with programming enabling them to be able to make independent targeting or weapons firing decisions – but those applications are mostly still in sci-fi type development. We have even talked about something that, in my view, does not get enough attention –...
21.08.09 | |

20 Aug

biggest ethical and legal issues arise – but with surveillance and independent target scanning and identification. But there are some other possible roles for robotics on the battlefield, including things like extraction of the wounded or delivery of supplies. A lot of the interest is less about autonomous battlefield robots as such than the multiple uses of unmanned vehicles on the battlefield. So, check out this article from (where else?) Popular Mechanics, which describes the recent UK MoD competition for mobile battlefield robot platforms (HT Instapundit): The United Kingdom’s Ministry...
20.08.08 | |

21 May

1 In my last post about battlefield robots, I quickly breezed through the ethical and legal priors that technology would go through before reaching the fundamental issues of autonomous battlefield robots – autonomy in decisionmaking in the use of weapons on the battlefield. Leaving aside the questions of exactly how that can be achieved as a matter of actual program (although, in fact, the ‘how’ is a primary question for me – too often, law professors and philosophers wave their hands at the practicalities, whereas the actual issues of translation...
21.05.08 | |

23 Jan

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross has a great interview with P.W. Singer of Brookings (and coordinator of the Obama campaign’s Defense Policy Task Force) about his new book concerning battlefield robots, Wired for War. Ken and others have written extensively about the use of battlefield robots on this blog and elsewhere, so I won’t re-hash the various legal, moral, and strategic issues here. (But do take a moment to look at this creepy video of a four legged robot.) Instead, I want to highlight a few interesting points from...
23.01.09 | |

18 Mar

Over the years a few of us have written issues concerning battlefield robots. (See, for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) Sometimes, we had links to remarkable videos of quadruped robots stomping through forests. Those robots and videos were made by Boston Dynamics, a company that started from an MIT research group. Besides its designing quadruped robots, Boston Dynamics gained further renown when, in 2013, it was acquired by Google as part of that company’s broad push into robotics. Just last month, one of Boston Dynamics’ new videos wen viral;...
18.03.16 | |