Kill or “only” destroy? A frightening question in the focus of military robot development.
Credit: Fox Movies’ “I, Robot”
Nicholas Carr adresses this topic in his recent post “Rules for warbots”. The basic idea he discusses is that the requirement for human control undermines the performance benefits and cost savings. But human controll is the only regulation of robots up to now. So the continuative questions are “what are the rules” and “how can the abidance be assured”. Carr cites an engineer with an U.S. warfare center who says: let’s design our armed unmanned systems to automatically ID, target, and neutralize or destroy the weapons used by our enemies – not the people using the weapons.
With regard to Armed Autonomous Systems the critical issue is the ability for the weapon to discriminate a legal target.
This discussions gives me an uneasy feeling, not only because of the analogies to Asimov’s “I, Robot”.
