Human Rights Watch released a report that urged a preemptive ban on armed autonomous robots. Evan Ackerman pushes back:
Whether or not you trust roboticists to develop autonomous or semi-autonomous weaponized systems safely, HRW’s solution of preemptively banning such robots is not practical. Robots are already a major part of the military, and their importance is only going to increase as technology improves and more and more dangerous tasks are given over to robots that don’t have families to go home to. You can’t simply outlaw progress because you think something bad might happen, and attempting to do so seems, frankly, to be rather shortsighted and ignores all of the contributions that military robotics has made and continues to make to the civilian sector.
Essentially, my disagreement with HRW’s proposal comes down to the fact that they are pessimistic about robotics, while I am optimistic. They see autonomous armed robots as something bad, while I see more potential for good. I believe that it’s possible to program robots to act in an ethical manner, and I also believe that robots can act as ethically or more ethically than humans in combat situations. No program is bug-free, and I have no doubt that there will be accidents with autonomous weaponized systems. But what we should be asking ourselves is whether or not the deployment of autonomous armed robots will overall be detrimental or beneficial to humans in conflict.
(Human Rights Watch video, making their case, after the jump.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRIcZRoLq8&w=500&rel=0]
