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New Laws of Robotics Proposed for US Kill-Bots
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Apr 14, 2007 03:43 PM
from the maybe-calling-them-kill-bots-is-a-bad-first-step dept.
from the maybe-calling-them-kill-bots-is-a-bad-first-step dept.
jakosc writes "The Register has a short commentary about a proposed new set of laws of robotics for war robots by John S Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Unlike Asimov's three laws of robotics Canning proposes (pdf) that we should 'Let machines target other machines and let men target men.' Although this sounds OK in principle, 'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
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Robot laws (Score:5, Insightful)
unless ... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Informative)
If someone is controlling it, at best it is a telerobot (semi-autonomous) or at worst, a telemanipulator.
A robot, by definition is autonomous and does not have or require human control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telerobotics [wikipedia.org]
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How does it work with un-uniformed combatants?
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Poorly?
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Informative)
It's knows which is which because all of the friendly aircraft have IFF systems that identify themselves.
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Interesting)
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Get over the idea that "terrorists" are new, they have been with us since we started forming tribes and throwing rocks at each other.
As for machines that autonomusly kill humans, landmines and other such traps ha
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Interesting)
In times of old a commoner's life was less secure. The lords of old had their own armys, armys are used to control territory regardless of who "owns" it (like many places in the world today). Although the lords eventually lost their private armies, mantraps were a legal symbol of disregard for commoner's that lasted well into the 1800's.
** caution rant ahead **
Edisons father tied him up and gave him a public arse flogging in the center of town when he was a child, that same act in the same town today would land his father in jail. When I was a kid black people couldn't vote, homo's deserved any beating they got, living together out of wedlock made you a social outcast, young and pregnant meant you had to give up your child for adoption so as not to shame your family, being a woman (or black or asian) meant I could pay you peanuts, harrass you at work, and sack you for not sucking my dick.
In a lot of ways we treat each other with more respect than we did even 50yrs ago, IMO the reason is because nation states are not that different to the fuedal lords of England and Europe who eventually worked out that beating the shit out of each other for the right to ransom each others nobility was counter-productive. I think GWB took us a step backwards but the historical trend toward a more and more "inclusive" society is hard to deny.
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"However, unless you believe that a woman submitted to the taliban mullahs participated in an "inclusive" society, GWB took an important step *forwa
Re:Robot laws (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh yeah? (Score:4, Interesting)
They're not the only ones. The Afghans - even with legally-dubious US support - never defeated the Russians, they merely lasted longer than the Russian bank accounts. The Celts were amongst the worst European fighters who ever lived, getting totally massacred by everyone and their cousin Bob, but Carthage stands in ruins, the Angles and Saxons only survive in tiny isolated communities in England and America (Oppenheiner's "The Origins of the British" shows that W.A.S.P.s exist only in their own mind, they have no historical reality), but the Celtic nations are actually doing OK for themselves at the moment.
Arguably, Serbia won the Balkans conflict, having conquered most of the lands belonging to their neighbors and slaughtered anyone who might claim them back. Uh, they're not doing so well for having won, are they? Kicked out of EU merger talks, Montenegro calling them a bunch of losers, Kosovo giving them the finger...
Hell, even the United States won in Iraq, as far as the actual war went.
Winning is the easy part. Anyone can win. Look how much of the world the British conquered. The British won far more than most nations could ever dream of. Yet contemporary accounts (I own several) describe the Great Exhibition as a PR stunt to create a delusion of grandeur that never existed. The Duke of Wellington, that master of winning, was described as a senile buffoon who was dribbling down his shirt and had to be propped up by others to stay on his horse. What's left of the Commonwealth shows you all too well that those descriptions of delusion were the reality, not the winning and not the gloating.
History dictates that who comes second in a war usually outlasts those who come first.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing governments with peoples. Yes the Irish are still around. So are the Italians, so, in fact, are the Germans, Japanese, and Brits. Winning or losing wars rarely affects that, with notable exceptions like the Native Americans, for whom I think it's pretty obvious losing was a bad thing. What aren't still around are governments. And while winning might not make one last forever, I think Hitler and Hirohito would tell you losing is much worse.
Seriously, the only way winning would not be a virtue, is if it led to complacency, arrogance, and ultimately weakness. But even then, you would have to _lose_ a war for it to matter. And really, with the exception of the Native American's most peoples have survived, and there's really no one to outlast. You are thinking of governments, and trust me, just because you can't think of the names of the governments that disappeared (fair because winners write history) they did.
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On the contrary, winning at any cost is often far worse than losing. A Pyrrhic Victory [wikipedia.org] often invites an even greater disaster in the future, but simply los
Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robot laws (Score:4, Insightful)
The only purpose REMOTELY possible by US military activity at the moment, is to (forcefully) create states that are NOT dangerous enemies to western civilization. If we followed your logic, even that last hope will be lost.
Re:Robot laws (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Robot laws (Score:5, Informative)
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The Geneva conventions take NO stance on the 12.5mm/50cal ammuntion and it's usage on humans. For that matter, shotguns loaded with slugs are larger in diameter. The whole 'aiming at equipment, such as a belt buckle', is most likely the result o
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Bullshit and liberal psycho-babble claptrap.
You get in fight, the other guy is bleeding more than you are and down for the count - You Win!
You get sued, the other guy loses more money than you - You Win!
You get into a war, yo
If you nuke someone (Score:3, Interesting)
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The last bit you said is the disturbing part regarding your
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If you're sitting at a bar, and some guy gets rowdy, you get into a fistfight, and the other guy spends the rest of the night bleeding on the floor. S
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You get in fight, the other guy is bleeding more than you are and down for the count - You Win!
Simplistic limited idealistic model. Can be disproven by so many more enlarged situational c
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Three rules... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The military will program their toys to kill everything and everything, and to hell with Asimov (right up until they turn on us)
3) Humans already count as collateral damage in warfare. Damn the men, spare the oilfields!
Re:Three rules... (Score:4, Informative)
huh (Score:4, Insightful)
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How i
Sounds more like RoboCop laws of robotics... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly though, I see value in a policy that no human life should be risked in automatic death systems - including land mines and other traps. These loopholes make that policy as useless as some RoboCop parody though.
Ryan Fenton
No, the original three laws work too. (Score:3, Insightful)
This reflects how real wars are fought, too. Na
Protects against political problems, not sentience (Score:3, Insightful)
The article summary doesn't give the right impression... the proposed policy would allow machines to target military machines. (see p.15-16 of the PDF) Page 23 is the most interesting, saying that anti-personnel landmines are looked down upon in the international community because they linger after war and kill civilians, whereas anti-tank mines aren't looked down upon so much, because they can only misfire during an armed conflict. So the policy is mostly intended to address international political responses to war, not to prevent sentient machines from taking over the human race.
Though, it would limit somewhat the extent to which machines could enslave the human race... if humans never took up arms, machines could never take lethal action against humans. That doesn't mean machines couldn't control humans politically/economically/socially (eg. deny food, deny housing), but it does mean they couldn't take up a policy of overt extermination of all humans, unless humans decided to fight to the last.
And how would these "laws" be programmed? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Reminds me of a story (Score:3, Interesting)
Killbots? A trifle. (Score:4, Funny)
Killing by proxy, "collateral damage" (Score:3, Informative)
'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage [spj.org], though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Here's a bigger, related question: a robot is a)not a person and b)maybe more durable. A human soldier is allowed to fire in defense. Picture a homeowner in wartime, guarding his house. Robot trundles by, x-rays the house, sees the weapon, charges in. He sees it heading for him, freaks out, fires at it. How can the robot possibly be justified in killing him? Even if it represents a threat, you're only threatening a machine!
Second point: this is really just "killing by proxy." Regardless of whether you pull a trigger on a machine gun, or flip a switch on the General Dynamics Deathmachine 2000: if you knew your actions would cause injury or death, you're culpable. It's not the robot that is responsible when a civilian or hors de combat soldier is killed: it's the operators. Robots don't kill people: people build, program, and operate robots that kill people.
Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
War is Hell (Score:4, Insightful)
"War is Hell"
Ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Ever talked to someone who was there or a civilian in European WWII?
War sucks. It's supposed to suck. Without the pain and suffering that war can bring to all sides of the battle, winners and losers alike. Perhaps the generals should go watch Star Trek Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, circa 1967.
That society has done such a nice job making war "clean" that they have decided to continue fighting a war for 500 years rather than just figure out how to make peace.
In most societies, people are taught that violence against others is fundamentally bad. This becomes a moral element that entwines all the people within that society. It also motivates the same people to find ways around doing violence.
If you study anything about the Nazi camps in WWII they had a growing behaviour where the soldiers in the concentration camps knew what they were doing but absolved themselves of any responsibility by hiding behind the statement, "I was just following orders", thereby removing themselves morally from the actitivies. After WWII this was considered to be a War Crime and has been backed by hundreds of trials across the world.
Fast forward 60 years and we are at a point where the soldiers who are operating a computer screen which operates these killer robots can absolve themselves from any responsibility of moral involvement because the Laws will simply allow them to say, I was just operating a computer program. And while this is going on, there is no one left to come back from the battlefield to serve as a reminder of just how bad war really is and how important it is to avoid it.
At the same time if we are going to commit to a war, we had better be willing to do it to completion even when it gets ugly. I'm pretty pissed at the news for giving us daily body counts of 4 and 10 soldiers on a 5 year battle. In contrast, WWII was hundreds to thousands a day and everyone was sticking to their plan. Everyone was commited to the plan and everyone knew why they were fighting. Vietnam wasn't so clear cut. It was rather vague as to why were where there and even on day one, not everyone was convinced we needed that war. And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
They'll get their killer robots and their legal loopholes to kill anything they want and no one will really do much because it's clean and doesn't interfere with "Dancing with the Stars" and the sheep continue to bleat
Please won't somebody think of the kill droids? (Score:4, Funny)
Honestly this strikes me like thoes people who adopt dogs that are prone to barking and then put collars on them to shock them when they do it. Its unfair I say, and worng to force something to act contrary to its nature. If you don't want a dog that barks much you should adopt a bread which is not given to barking or maybe just get a cat.
The same is true for robots. If you don't want a robot that runs around killing everything it detects especially you then you should forgo adopting or building a kill droid. Maybe go get yourself one of thoes more friendly industrial breads that enjoys welding steel pannels onto cars or if space is a concern some types of robots are very small and even enjoy roaming around your home vacuming the floor for you as they do. There is an appropriate type of robot for almost ever situation. Please be responsible and only adopt a kill droid if you have adequate supplies of victims for it to kill.
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Worthwhile pursuit (Score:4, Insightful)
OMG! THEY KILLED KINNEY! (Score:4, Funny)