Search: robots
22 May Bad Bots: Battlefield Robots and Counters to Them as Weapons Against the US
(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...21 Aug Lyin’, Cheatin’ Robots
The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code “genome” that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it. The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly “mated” and...13 Dec “Guilty Robots” in NYT Magazine Ideas 2009 Issue
One of my favorite issues of the New York Times Magazine is its “year in ideas” issue, which comes annually in December. Because OJ is a repository of things related to battlefield robotics and law and ethics, I wanted to flag for your attention the item by Dara Kerr, “Guilty Robots.” [I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative — acting rationally and with a sense of moral duty. This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype...23 Jan Rise, Robots, Rise!
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...29 Dec In 2013, I Resolve to Post a Lot … But Only About Robots
...suggestion and blog in 2013 about robots, technology, and the inter-relationships with international law, international organizations, globalization more broadly. I think Chris is right to say that we reflexively think about domestic law when it comes to these areas, but there are many issues in international economic law, as well as the economics of globalization more generally. Here’s a question I plan to explore across all the places I blog in 2013, including OJ – I’m thinking about offering a course in robots and the law, a research seminar, in...22 May Battlefield Robots as a Technological Response to ‘Lawfare’, and the Limits to Technological Counters to Bad Behavior
(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...08 Mar FT Review Essay on Battlefield Robots Books
...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...04 Jan John Pike on “Stone-Cold Robot Killers on the Battlefield” in the Washington Post
...government to be as untrustworthy as others, you might disagree. (Exercise for the reader: but not necessarily so.) 5. Re "remote control robots," excellent point! (One which could have more profitably been made some 30-odd comments ago.) Remote control (RC) robots (depending on your definition) are already in use, and will become increasingly so. Autonomous robots will gradually arise as RC ones become increasingly able to perform independently. This is a purely practical matter. If the robots are unable to function acceptably past a certain independence level, then the military...06 Oct Charli Carpenter on Battlefield Robots, Lawfare, and Norm Entrepreneurship
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...17 Mar Revised Version of My Killer Robots Article
...above, pointed out an unresolved tension in the earlier version. On the one hand, I argue that although most consequentialist critiques accept that the key issue with autonomous weapons is whether they can comply with IHL as well as human soldiers, those critiques focus almost exclusively on the limits of AWS technology, ignoring the far more serious limits on the ability of humans to make rational decisions. On the other hand, I argue that many deontological critiques of autonomous weapons are misguided because they assume that killer robots “decide” in...