Stopping Killer Robots
The examples used aren’t going to scare anyone because the Phalanx is an automated defense system, designed to take out incoming missiles, and we are anesthetized to drone warfare at this point when we are hunting non state actors who use terror tactics.
How are we going to feel about drones however in the next big war? The costs to field drones vs. manned aircraft creates a very dystopic vision for me of one possible future. One where swarms of drones circle our skies with autonomous missions of shooting down anything without the right IFF signals, and where they also hunt ground targets, one where phalanx like systems are used to cover the entrances at walled communities and other places. You can also picture rogue nations leapfrogging to air superiority very quickly with a few thousand autonomous drones designed to find and target all other aircraft.
You can mark me down as philosophically against “Skynet” … however there are limited defensive applications where autonomous fire is rational and justified (e.g. ship mounted phalanx, patriot batteries, Iron Dome, etc.) even in those cases the systems should require humans monitoring them whenever they are “on.”
Simon Makin: What is the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots?
Mark Bishop: It is a confederation of non-governmental organizations and pressure groups lobbying for a ban on producing and deploying fully autonomous weapon systems, where the ability of a human to both choose the precise target and intervene in the final decision to attack is removed.
SM: How close are we to this?
MB: Examples already exist. Some, such as the Phalanx gun system, used on the majority of U.S. Navy ships to detect and automatically engage incoming threats, have been around for some time. Another is the Israeli Harpy “fire-and-forget” unmanned aerial vehicle, which will seek out and destroy radar installations.
SM: What’s driving the technology’s development?
MB: Current Western military strategy focuses more on drones than on traditional forces, but remote-controlled drones are vulnerable to hijacking. Fully autonomous systems are virtually immune to this. They also lower costs. This means manufacturers sell more, so there is a commercial imperative to develop autonomous systems and for governments to deploy them.
SM: What are the dangers?
MB: There are reasons to doubt whether autonomous systems can appropriately judge the need to engage, react to threats proportionately, or reliably discriminate between combatants and civilians. Also, when you get complex software systems interacting, there is huge potential for unforeseen consequences. A vivid example was seen on Amazon in 2011 when pricing bots raised the cost of a book, The Making of a Fly, to more than $23 million.
More: Campaign to Stop Killer Robots: Should We Ban Autonomous Weapons?