Killer Robots + Ancient Rules of War = Trouble

Note to Self

WNYC Studios

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4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2014

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can replacing human soldiers with robot warriors save lives and make war more humane? We try to find out in this episode. But as we learn, the laws of war are not written in computer code. Modern warfare is not ready for killer robots that "decide" without human input.

"When a robot gets blown up, that's another life saved." - Mark Belanger, iRobot.

In this episode, we hear from the people making the robots as they show off their lethal products. We meet a former fighter pilot who touts the values of automation and likes lawyers sitting side by side with soldiers. Several experts tell us about the terrifying moral risks of letting machines think too far ahead of people in battle. We learn there could be lives to be saved, war could be made less atrocious if -- and it is a huge if -- the technology can advance side by side with the antiquated laws. In the end, we hear from the activists who want autonomous lethal weapons banned before they march on the enemy. A U.N. body has just begun to consider it.

A version of this story won the German Prize for Innovation Journalism. It aired on Deutschlandfunk by Thomas Reintjes with help from Philip Banse.

Quotes heard in this episode:

"Maybe we can make war -- as horrible as it sounds -- less devastating to the non-combatants than it currently is." -Ronald Arkin director of the Mobile Robot Lab at Georgia Tech

When to unleash the machines: "They must do better than human beings before they should be deployed in the battlefield."

-Ronald Arkin

On why Las Vegas could be considered a target: "With Napoleonic-era combat, you knew where the battlefield was, right? With modern warfare, modern conflict, you really don't know, where the battlefield is." -

"Robotics has been trying to do visual recognition for... a bit more than 50 years and we can just about tell the difference between a lion and a car. So the idea of putting one of these things onto a battlefield... and thinking it should discriminate between [innocent people] and insurgents is just insane."

"In today's warfare, a drone pilot is looking on a screen, talking to potentially five to ten other people looking at that same screen, one of which is a lawyer."

About autonomous lethal weapons: "These machines for the foreseeable future would fail to meet the requirements of international law." -Peter Asaro, International Committee for Robot Arms Control

he preemptive ban is the only thing that makes sense."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City.
0:07.0	Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.
0:31.0	This is New Text City, the show where digital gets personal.
0:35.0	I'm Anouche Summerodi, and this week, the Automation of War.
0:40.0	Weapons that kill before an actual human being tells them to.
0:45.0	Human, one check, confirmed. Does it have a weapon?
0:50.0	Weapon detected. Weapon, one check, fire, one.
0:56.0	So this episode comes to us from a reporter called Thomas Reintis.
1:00.0	He's actually a reporter with Deutschland Funk in Germany, and he just won the German Award for Innovation Journalism for this piece.
1:09.0	And his investigation into how warfare technology is colliding with international law.
1:15.0	It took me about half a year, and I talked to dozens of people because I thought the debate on drones was missing some important ethical aspects.
1:23.0	It turned out it's not easy to align the use of autonomous weapons with our existing laws and ethics.
1:29.0	And it's an excellent production on one of those topics that you may not think about every day.
1:35.0	But if nobody from the public thinks about it, it could get very dangerous very quickly.
1:41.0	And since this great reporting was only available to German speakers, we here at New Text City wanted to bring it to you in English.
1:49.0	And frankly, the timing of this story could not be more perfect.
1:54.0	As the US military is heading back to Iraq and vowing to destroy ISIS, ground troops aren't part of the plan.
2:02.0	The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.
2:08.0	As your commander-in-chief, I will not commit you and the rest of our armed forces to fighting another ground war in Iraq.
2:15.0	President Barack Obama and pretty much every American wants to avoid casualties of American soldiers.
2:22.0	We've seen a decade of predator drones used in place of piloted fighter planes to lower the risk to American service people.
2:30.0	But that is just the beginning. The incentive to use robots in war is growing and the law is struggling to keep up.
	...

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