“. . . a fighting-machine without men as a means of attack
and defense. The continuous
development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere contest of
machines without men and without loss of life . . .” You might think this quotation is from the discussion that
followed the speech on May 30 by Christof Heyns, the United Nations “special
rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions,” who came before
the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to call for a moratorium on the
development of lethal autonomous robots (LARs, for short).
But in fact, they are the words of famed inventor Nikola
Tesla, writing in the June 1900 issue of Century
magazine. Besides his better-known
inventions of three-phase power, induction motors, and high-voltage Tesla
coils, Tesla founded a field he called “telautomatics” which we would refer to
today as radio-controlled vehicles.
Visitors to his New York City laboratory in the late 1890s could watch
Tesla as he pointed out a model boat on a stand, complete with battery-powered
motor and rudder. With no
intervening wires, Tesla could remotely command the boat’s motor to run and
turn the rudder, all by means of what later became known as radio waves. In 1899, he even demonstrated the model
to an organization called the Chicago Commercial Club. As the boat made its way around an
artificial lake set up in the auditorium, Tesla steered it at will and even set
off exploding cartridges. Clearly,
military operations were in Tesla’s mind, and he tried to interest government
agencies in his invention, but to no avail.
Although Tesla’s remote-controlled battleships never got
beyond the toy-model stage, his imagination went straight on to the ultimate
extreme: machines that fought
entirely without human intervention.
Tesla’s dream (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) became
reality with the secret deployment in the 1960s of drones: unmanned aircraft equipped with
sensors, communications links, and missiles that destroy selected ground
targets on receipt of a human command.
But the human is typically thousands of miles away and undergoes no
personal risk worse than eyestrain from too many hours at a computer
terminal. This is not to ignore
the psychological problems that remote-control killing can cause, but simply to
point out the highly asymmetrical nature of an engagement between persons on
the ground in Afghanistan, say, who have been determined by espionage to be
worthy of elimination, and those in the U. S. who carry out the decisions of
the President to eliminate them.
UN staff member Heyns is talking not about conventional
drones, in which a human being is still involved in the decision to kill,
however remotely, but about machines that would “decide” who and when to kill
on their own, without the direct involvement of a human in the contemporaneous
decision train. In a way, we have
had systems like that for years.
They are called land mines.
They are exceedingly dumb, and what they do should not be dignified by
the term “decision,” but when a person deploys a land mine, that person has no
idea when it will explode or who it will kill. That depends instead on a mechanical condition, namely,
getting close enough to set off the land mine. Although the conditions that a lethal autonomous robot would
require before killing are no doubt more complicated, the difference between an
LAR and a land mine is one of degree more than one of kind.
Not surprisingly, Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace
Prize for her efforts to end all use of land mines, has joined Heyns in his
call for a ban or moratorium on the development of LARs. As Josh Dzieza of The Daily Beast points out, the U. S. Department of Defense has
itself issued an internal directive that defers the deployment of such weapons
for at least until 2022, unless they change their minds. But as with other types of new deadly
weapons that become technically feasible, every nation with the capability to
develop them is eyeing everyone else, and stands ready to jump in after the
first one does.
Heyns objects to LARs for several reasons, but chief among
them is the fact that there is what he terms a “responsibility vacuum” involved
if a wholly autonomous device violates the international laws of war. If a soldier-controlled drone goes awry
and kills seventeen children at a birthday party instead of a gang of
terrorists, the soldier can in principle be called to account. But if a number of LARs are set loose
on a battlefield, the situation is not essentially different from one in which
land mines are deployed, except that the LARs may be more discriminating and
more effective because they can move around and chase people. There is no one in the chain of
causation for an LAR kill who is as clearly identifiable as the person who
presses the button releasing a drone’s missile on a specific target.
There is also the hoary old sci-fi scenario of robots that
turn on their masters, which can be traced all the way back to the legendary
Golem: an anthropomorphic being
made by a rabbi dabbling in magic.
At first the rabbi commands the Golem to do good deeds, but eventually
the monster turns on him and kills him, at least in some versions of the legend
that date back to the 1300s A. D.
If good engineering practices are used, I would expect all LARs to have
some sort of nearly fail-safe “pull-the-plug” command. But the whole point of LARs is to have
them work so fast and well that human intervention isn’t needed. If something goes wrong, it will
probably go wrong so fast that a human monitor couldn’t pull the plug until it
was too late, even if the robot was about to attack its creators.
Neither the U. S. nor any European country has wholly
endorsed Heyns’ call for a complete moratorium on LAR development. The U. S., which appears to be the
leader in this field, does not appear to be rushing into deploying lethal
autonomous weapons any time soon, at least in public. There are enough war-related things to worry about already
without adding the threat of robotic assassinations gone awry.
Tesla’s speculative hope in 1900 was that
remote-controlled warfare would prove so horrible that universal peace would
automatically ensue. Events have
falsified this particular prophecy of his, as the world has proved to be
entirely too tolerant of horrors that even Tesla could not imagine. But if we can at least delay adding
another item to our worry list by not developing lethal autonomous robots, I
think we should hold off as long as we can.
Sources: The quotation from Tesla’s Century article appears on p. 308 of W.
Bernard Carlson’s excellent new biography, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
(Princeton Univ. Press, 2013). I
referred to the following news articles from Radio Free Europe
at
http://www.rferl.org/content/killer-robots-un-moratorium-call/25003167.html,
a UPI report from the website military.com at
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/05/31/un-expert-calls-for-moratorium-on-military-robots.html,
and John Dzieza’s article in The Daily Beast for May 30 at
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/30/the-pros-and-cons-of-killer-robots.html,
as well as the Wikipedia articles on the Golem and
unmanned aerial vehicles.
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