Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Harpy unmanned aircraft
Self-thinking military robots, not unlike the killing machines featured in the Terminator movies, are by no means the stuff of science fiction, warns Professor Noel Sharkey, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics at the University of Sheffield. “The next thing that’s coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots,” he recently told the media in London. “The robot will do the killing itself.”
The problem with such a development, Sharkey says, is that robots cannot handle two basic tenets of warfare: Discriminating friend from foe; and determining when enough-is-enough in attacking the enemy. Yet, political and military officials are pushing ahead with advances in unmanned weapons systems.
In an American military report, U.S. Air Force officials predict the deployment of fully autonomous attack planes in the near future. “Advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input,” says the report, while adding that “authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions.”
The Israelis already have a pilotless “fire-and-forget” aircraft (Harpy) that can locate enemy radar signals and automatically attack its source with air-to-surface missiles, all without any human assistance.
Even now, with the growing use of unmanned aircraft controlled by humans on the ground, robots cannot adequately discriminate civilians from enemy targets. Sharkey estimated that between January 2006 and April 2009, the U.S. carried out approximately 60 “drone” attacks in Pakistan, killing 14 al Qaeda members, but also causing 687 civilian fatalities.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Call for Debate on Killer Robots (by Jason Palmer, BBC News)
United States Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 (U.S. Air Force) (PDF)
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