New York, June 19: Imagine wars where weapons can make their own decisions! Well, your imagination can someday turn into a reality
-- thanks to scientists who have developed a new software that
they claim is a step towards getting robotic aircraft to make
their own, ethical decisions about wielding lethal force.
A team, led by Ron Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed an "ethical governor", which aims to ensure that robot attack aircraft behave ethically in combat, and is demonstrating the system in simulations based on recent campaigns by US troops, using real maps from the Middle East.
In one scenario, modeled on a situation encountered by US forces in Afganistan in 2006, the drone identifies a group of Taliban soldiers inside a defined "kill zone". But the drone doesn't fire. Its maps indicate the group is inside a cemetery, so opening fire would breach international law.
In another scenario, the drone identifies an enemy vehicle convoy close to a hospital. Here the ethical governor only allows fire that will damage the vehicles without harming the hospital, the 'New Scientist' reported.
The team has also built in a "guilt" system which, if a serious error is made, forces a drone to start behaving more cautiously.
According to Arkin, the research, funded by US Army, is not designed to develop prototypes for future battlefield use. "The most important outcome of my research is not the architecture, but the discussion that it stimulates."
However, he said that the development of machines that decide how to use lethal force is inevitable, making it important that when such robots do arrive they can be trusted.
"These ideas will not be used tomorrow, but in the war after next, and in very constrained situations." However, experts are not convinced.
"Simulations are a powerful way to imagine one possible version of the future of combat. But they gloss over the complexities of getting robots to understand the world well enough to make such judgements, something unlikely to be possible for decades," said Illah Nourbakhsh of the Carnegie Mellon University.
Bureau Report