More drones, more robots, more wars?

by Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sometime in the next three decades, the U.S. military will be able to field robots that can make life-and-death decisions, operating without human supervision thanks to software and superfast computers.

But the technology to get to that point is running far ahead of considerations of the ethics of robotic warfare.

Or, as Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written widely on military robots has put it - technology grows at an exponential pace, human institutions at a linear, if not glacial, pace. That echoes an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that "science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

The subject merits debate after the January 26 announcement that the Pentagon is planning to trim America's armed forces by 100,000 while boosting the global fleet of armed drones, America's most effective tool for the targeted killing of anti-American militants. So far, the drones are remotely operated, by pilots on bases in the United States.

But for a glimpse of how U.S. military thinkers see the future of the drone program, an 82-page report by the Air Force is recommended reading. Entitled Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 (http://tinyurl.com/7gwd48s), it says that "advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input."

Rather than just supporting humans in what the military calls the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act), drones will be able to "fully participate" in each step of the process. Humans will no longer be "in the loop" but "on the loop" - able to veto decisions taken by the flying robot - if time permits in the split-second environment of combat.

While they make more headlines than other systems, drones are just part of an American inventory that has grown explosively over the past decade and includes ground-based robots whose tasks range from defusing improvised explosives devices and shooting down incoming artillery shells to evacuating wounded soldiers. From virtually zero, the drone fleet grew to more than 7,500 and ground based robots to an estimated 15,000.

"Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal an ethical questions," the paper states. "Ethical decisions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path"

In other words, let's sort out ethics and policies before letting the robotics genie fully out of the bottle. It's a point made with increasing alarm by a number of civilian scientists, robotics experts and ethicists who fear, among other things, that sending more robots and fewer humans into wars will make starting them easier.

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

"Wepossess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war," Singer, author of Wired for War, wrote in an essay in the New York Times this month. "The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don't have to send someone's son or daughter into harms way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter - and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media - they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way."

This is a view shared by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), a group formed in 2009 to press for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. ICRAC believes that the robotics revolution of warfare deserves the kind of debate that led to treaties on the use of poison gas or the ban on landmines.

None of the questions that prompted the formation of the group have been answered. For example: who would be accountable if an autonomous robot killed civilians? The manufacturer? The field commander in whose area the robot operates? The programmers who wrote the software? The procurement officer? The president?

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross has begun looking into the implications of robots in war but those favoring more regulations should not expect support from the administration of Barack Obama, who has presided over a dramatic increase in the number of drone strikes on targets in Pakistan since he took office in 2009.

That campaign, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than the military, killed dozens of al Qaeda fighters and other militants using the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan as a safe haven. The strikes also killed civilians and stoked anti-American hatred in a country of 180 million that is of strategic importance to the United States. There has been similar blow-back in Yemen and Somalia.

This is one of the reasons why some prominent experts on military robots favor slowing the pace of development. In December, philosopher Patrick Lin of the California Polytechnic State University ended a briefing to CIA officials with a line robotic warfare enthusiasts might do well to remember:

"Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a 'do first, think later' (or worse 'do first, apologize later') approach but it helps us win the moral high ground - perhaps the most strategic of battlefields."

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)