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I don't understand the argument against military robots and AI. Why is it more moral to send men to die instead of machines? Edit: About asymmetry in the batt

I don't understand the argument against military robots and AI. Why is it more moral to send men to die instead of machines? Edit: About asymmetry in the battlefield, yes, but then you should say the same of all advanced weaponry, right? Each side is aspiring for asymmetry in war technology. About the army refusing to carry out orders. That's a good point that I hadn't thought of. I'm not super sure that current humans are really that great, but it's a fair point. About the cost of war. High end military technology is very expensive and something this sophisticated probably won't be cheap. But even disregarding that, I would prefer thousands of machines being destroyed to humans dying.

beojan 8y ago
The problem is AI taking the decision to kill people.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  Get your own AI, problem solved.
  - drb91 8y ago
    One robot vs state violence?
    - wetpaws 8y ago
      I should've probably elaborate on my comment cause of course people will reflexively downvote it, but proxy wars, smaller armies, and now AI driven conflicts are the natural evolution of warfare. We went from slaughter of millions to hanful of extremely professional soldiers to, eventually fight of machines. (MGS4 depicted it in striking details years ago).
      - simion314 8y ago
        Do you think that a country would surrender because your robots won a robot fight? There will still be an army and an occupation resistance movement that will fight your robots and lives will still be lost. The attackers would continue to destroy the roads,train station, food reserves, energy production facilities ... maybe AI is the future but is not better and we should try to make killer robots usage illegal.
        wetpaws 8y ago
        The concept of proxy fight is not new, it is probably as old as humanity. Bible had David vs Goliath. Maya used a variation of soccer to solve military conflicts. (You can see it depicted on temple walls). You are focused on "destroying" part, but in fact it is only a part of the warfare, and a very expensive one. (Part of the reason why we see progressively less and less large scale conflicts is because we are growing more and more economically interconnected and a cost of open warfare just not worth it anymore)
        simion314 8y ago
        I would love to see politicians or generals fight directly, but this does not happen at all , we see proxy wars where powers A and B fight indirectly by getting involved in some country C conflict. I do not believe that if we get AI robots involved we will not see bombs land on bridges,as recently as the war in Yugoslavia bombs were droped on economic targets: "NATO bombed strategic economic and societal targets, such as bridges, military facilities, official government facilities, and factories, using long-range cruise missiles to hit heavily defended targets, such as strategic installations in Belgrade and Pristina." Are you imagining 2 robot teams fighting each other and the winner gets the loser resources and impose it's politics, the population will accept that their robots lost ?
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > I cannot tell why the spokesmen I have cited want the developments I forecast to become true. Some of them have told me that they work on them for the morally bankrupt reason that "If we don't do it, someone else will." They fear that evil people will develop superintelligent machines and use them to oppress mankind, and that the only defense against these enemy machines will be superintelligent machines controlled by us, that is, by well-intentioned people. Others reveal that they have abdicated their autonomy by appealing to the "principle" of technological inevitability. But, finally, all I can say with assurance is that these people are not stupid. All the rest is mystery. -- Joseph Weizenbaum
- ReptileMan 8y ago
  I see no problem with that. The killed don't care who took the decision. And we could tune the AI to be as trigger happy as we like it to be. So if you want strict rules of engagement - program them. If you want to cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war - ditto. The moral decision is still yours but as standing order, you ignore couple of middlemen.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Or rather than being trigger happy they could have higher standards for targeting than even the ICRC suggests. Leave the cook instead of shooting him as a combatant. Shoot to disable rather than kill. Use less lethal weapons even in a real war if appropriate. Deliberately take 90% casualties in order to minimise civilian or even enemy casualties.
- gh02t 8y ago
  There's a lot to the question of morality. Can an AI exercise the same moral judgement a human would make, or is it just an imperfect copy doomed to eventually commit an immoral act? I think the latter is obviously true, given that humans aren't perfectly moral decision makers, either. Is the creator of this AI responsible for the actions of their creation? And many other dilemmas and consequences that seem overwhelming to consider, regardless of your conclusion. Also, there's the more practical worry of the Skynet scenario. Once a machine is empowered to make judgement decisions to kill humans it's a real possibility that even something as innocuous as a bug or design flaw could turn the world into a sci-fi cliche. I don't really know where I stand honestly, but I do find the prospect paralyzing.
- kamaal 8y ago
  We don't yet have any AGI that takes decisions to kill people. So let's be frank, Real Humans are here making decisions to kill people. Only that delegation of non-critical decisions is transitioned to programs.
joe_the_user 8y ago
It seems likely that soldiers will still be fighting on each side for quite a while and moreover, it is certain that there will be civilian casualties aside from the military casualties on at least the losing side. Think of it this way - war isn't a game. Each side has a strong incentive to make the other side fear to go to war with it. Killing people is a necessary part of this. The progression of technology has generally resulted in an advantage for the attacker over the defender. So two armies in conflict aren't going work by "may the best robot win while we humans watch" Rather, it seems much more likely a robot war of the future would be something "my swarm of death bots kills your people while your swarm kills mine".
rdlecler1 8y ago
When you send your own people to war there is a cost to society and to ones conscious. Society can also challenge that cost and it may be enough to stop or prevent an unjust war. What happens when we can wage war with impunity? When there no costs? As bad as war is, it may even be worse.
- nradov 8y ago
  The monetary costs of war will still be huge even if humans are no longer on the battlefield. Modern weapons are extremely expensive already, and getting even more expensive with each new generation. An F-35A unit cost is $85M. A hypothetical AI controlled drone with similar capabilities would only be marginally cheaper.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    The environmental and human costs represented by that figure are overlooked. How much pollution was created to make that $85 million fighter jet? When a government of the future spends 500 billion to make a field full of robot trash fighting with another government, what are the externalities of that?
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
    Right, but when those who have corrupted the government for their purposes actually benefit from that equation, that cost is actually an encouragement, not a deterrent, towards war. Of course it at least offers a slightly easier antiwar political target, but we've seen how that has failed in the past.
Barrin92 8y ago
if only one side has access to automated weaponry, which is easy to imagine in our current environment of asymmetric warfare the barrier to use lethal force may rapidly drop. We already see this in drone warfare which is practiced in semi-legal fashion, without civil society having a clue of who is being targeted or when. We face the danger of slipping more into some sort of shadow realm where private actors and intelligence engages in war without democratic legitimacy. Then there is the issue of the technology being abused to target vulnerable populations, like immigrant or refugee groups, again lowering the barrier of using violence or surveillance.
davesque 8y ago
Because I think people take pause when considering sending their own countrymen to their deaths. They won't think as long or as hard if killing the enemy is simply a question of deploying robots. Think drone strikes. Also, recent developments in machine learning have seen computer programs outperform humans on certain tasks. Granted, those tasks currently are very specific, but if we extrapolate 30 or 40 years into the future, we may have killing robots which can't possibly be defended against by people without comparable technology. I think it's also simply a matter of imagining the particulars of a world with sophisticated killing robots. Imagine some kind of hunter drone tracking you, finding you, and dispassionately killing you. Do you want to live in that kind of world? Would you want to suffer that kind of fate?
- EGreg 8y ago
  How would comparable technology protect against swarms of drones designed to track down specific people or even worse just a large swath of people?
- latch 8y ago
  > Because people take pause I generally agree, especially if the bar is "taking pause", but playing the devil's advocate, is this _really_ true. They pay lip service to it. They weigh the politics of it. But I feel that between the Vietnam war and the 2nd Iraq war we can at least question the degree of their concern. Project 100,000 is a specific example I'd point to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
  - davesque 8y ago
    I'm sure there are counterexamples to my statement but I personally believe that it is true that most people would struggle with knowingly sending soldiers to their death. It's just my opinion.
    - lostgame 8y ago
      There are those who believe that a death in protection of their country is honourable, and those who believe whatever number of people are sacrificed in the name of their flag to be worth it. I can't imagine it, but they do exist.
sooheon 8y ago
You won't send machines to die, you send them to kill other humans.
shakna 8y ago
A well armed state sending an effecient army of machines against a less-well armed state makes for some power-problems, and it isn't machine-vs-machine. It's going to be machine-vs-people-who-can't-afford-machines. Imagine the first Gulf-War if the USA didn't have to care about how many of their own people were dying. It makes it easier for scorched-earth policies. ... Then take one more step. Many military advances are then handed down to the services like the police. It doesn't matter if you have the right to bear arms if the rather cheaper machines outnumber you, and can outgun you. Governments have a serious problem with scope creep. They promise things will only ever be used for one thing, and definitely not the other thing... Until the next government takes over. Or in the case of the current US government, tomorrow.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
This is my take on it. A government with an AI army is free to suppress its populace. A government with a human army may suppress its populace, but the army can refuse to do so. Civilian control of the military, and a military that is composed of citizens (particularly in a democratic republic) may not choose to obey an order to suppress fellow citizens. An AI army would (presumably) have no conscience.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Note that this point matters even short of full automation: the fewer people a state needs to rely on, the more tyrannical it can be. (Yes, there have been plenty of horrors with mass participation.)
King-Aaron 8y ago
It's not an argument of sending men to die instead of machines. It's an argument about sending machines to conduct an incredibly asymmetrical and highly efficient method of dispatching humans with reduced oversight and ability to determine if particular orders are controversial or not (Arkhipov comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov)
simion314 8y ago
It is not about morality in the case you describe but in the potential of having more wars and victims, some of my reasons I dislike the idea are: - in a democracy you need to convince the society that they should give their lives so you need to have or invent a good enough reason, this means you can't start a war easy. - humans trust computers too much this days, one example was a person that almost drove over a cliff because Google map told him to do it, he noticed for a while that something is not right but trusted the computer more then himself. - humans can think and most of the time take good decisions and avoid pointless deaths, I am thinking at a Russian soldier that could have launched a nuclear strike because some faulty "sensors" a computer would have just done it. - there was a case posted here on HN where a german pilot decided not to destroy a damaged enemy plane because he saw the enemy pilot and he could not just kill, aka most humans do not like killing where a killer robot would have no problem killing children, wounded soldiers,doctors.
Mc_Big_G 8y ago
Men don't have the potential to all have the same bug or get hacked which causes them to kill anything that moves.

beojan 8y ago

The problem is AI taking the decision to kill people.

wetpaws 8y ago
Get your own AI, problem solved.
- drb91 8y ago
  One robot vs state violence?
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    I should've probably elaborate on my comment cause of course people will reflexively downvote it, but proxy wars, smaller armies, and now AI driven conflicts are the natural evolution of warfare. We went from slaughter of millions to hanful of extremely professional soldiers to, eventually fight of machines. (MGS4 depicted it in striking details years ago).
    - simion314 8y ago
      Do you think that a country would surrender because your robots won a robot fight? There will still be an army and an occupation resistance movement that will fight your robots and lives will still be lost. The attackers would continue to destroy the roads,train station, food reserves, energy production facilities ... maybe AI is the future but is not better and we should try to make killer robots usage illegal.
      - wetpaws 8y ago
        The concept of proxy fight is not new, it is probably as old as humanity. Bible had David vs Goliath. Maya used a variation of soccer to solve military conflicts. (You can see it depicted on temple walls). You are focused on "destroying" part, but in fact it is only a part of the warfare, and a very expensive one. (Part of the reason why we see progressively less and less large scale conflicts is because we are growing more and more economically interconnected and a cost of open warfare just not worth it anymore)
        simion314 8y ago
        I would love to see politicians or generals fight directly, but this does not happen at all , we see proxy wars where powers A and B fight indirectly by getting involved in some country C conflict. I do not believe that if we get AI robots involved we will not see bombs land on bridges,as recently as the war in Yugoslavia bombs were droped on economic targets: "NATO bombed strategic economic and societal targets, such as bridges, military facilities, official government facilities, and factories, using long-range cruise missiles to hit heavily defended targets, such as strategic installations in Belgrade and Pristina." Are you imagining 2 robot teams fighting each other and the winner gets the loser resources and impose it's politics, the population will accept that their robots lost ?
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > I cannot tell why the spokesmen I have cited want the developments I forecast to become true. Some of them have told me that they work on them for the morally bankrupt reason that "If we don't do it, someone else will." They fear that evil people will develop superintelligent machines and use them to oppress mankind, and that the only defense against these enemy machines will be superintelligent machines controlled by us, that is, by well-intentioned people. Others reveal that they have abdicated their autonomy by appealing to the "principle" of technological inevitability. But, finally, all I can say with assurance is that these people are not stupid. All the rest is mystery. -- Joseph Weizenbaum
ReptileMan 8y ago
I see no problem with that. The killed don't care who took the decision. And we could tune the AI to be as trigger happy as we like it to be. So if you want strict rules of engagement - program them. If you want to cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war - ditto. The moral decision is still yours but as standing order, you ignore couple of middlemen.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Or rather than being trigger happy they could have higher standards for targeting than even the ICRC suggests. Leave the cook instead of shooting him as a combatant. Shoot to disable rather than kill. Use less lethal weapons even in a real war if appropriate. Deliberately take 90% casualties in order to minimise civilian or even enemy casualties.
gh02t 8y ago
There's a lot to the question of morality. Can an AI exercise the same moral judgement a human would make, or is it just an imperfect copy doomed to eventually commit an immoral act? I think the latter is obviously true, given that humans aren't perfectly moral decision makers, either. Is the creator of this AI responsible for the actions of their creation? And many other dilemmas and consequences that seem overwhelming to consider, regardless of your conclusion. Also, there's the more practical worry of the Skynet scenario. Once a machine is empowered to make judgement decisions to kill humans it's a real possibility that even something as innocuous as a bug or design flaw could turn the world into a sci-fi cliche. I don't really know where I stand honestly, but I do find the prospect paralyzing.
kamaal 8y ago
We don't yet have any AGI that takes decisions to kill people. So let's be frank, Real Humans are here making decisions to kill people. Only that delegation of non-critical decisions is transitioned to programs.

joe_the_user 8y ago

It seems likely that soldiers will still be fighting on each side for quite a while and moreover, it is certain that there will be civilian casualties aside from the military casualties on at least the losing side. Think of it this way - war isn't a game. Each side has a strong incentive to make the other side fear to go to war with it. Killing people is a necessary part of this. The progression of technology has generally resulted in an advantage for the attacker over the defender. So two armies in conflict aren't going work by "may the best robot win while we humans watch" Rather, it seems much more likely a robot war of the future would be something "my swarm of death bots kills your people while your swarm kills mine".

rdlecler1 8y ago

When you send your own people to war there is a cost to society and to ones conscious. Society can also challenge that cost and it may be enough to stop or prevent an unjust war. What happens when we can wage war with impunity? When there no costs? As bad as war is, it may even be worse.

nradov 8y ago
The monetary costs of war will still be huge even if humans are no longer on the battlefield. Modern weapons are extremely expensive already, and getting even more expensive with each new generation. An F-35A unit cost is $85M. A hypothetical AI controlled drone with similar capabilities would only be marginally cheaper.
- code_duck 8y ago
  The environmental and human costs represented by that figure are overlooked. How much pollution was created to make that $85 million fighter jet? When a government of the future spends 500 billion to make a field full of robot trash fighting with another government, what are the externalities of that?
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Right, but when those who have corrupted the government for their purposes actually benefit from that equation, that cost is actually an encouragement, not a deterrent, towards war. Of course it at least offers a slightly easier antiwar political target, but we've seen how that has failed in the past.

Barrin92 8y ago

if only one side has access to automated weaponry, which is easy to imagine in our current environment of asymmetric warfare the barrier to use lethal force may rapidly drop. We already see this in drone warfare which is practiced in semi-legal fashion, without civil society having a clue of who is being targeted or when. We face the danger of slipping more into some sort of shadow realm where private actors and intelligence engages in war without democratic legitimacy. Then there is the issue of the technology being abused to target vulnerable populations, like immigrant or refugee groups, again lowering the barrier of using violence or surveillance.

davesque 8y ago

Because I think people take pause when considering sending their own countrymen to their deaths. They won't think as long or as hard if killing the enemy is simply a question of deploying robots. Think drone strikes. Also, recent developments in machine learning have seen computer programs outperform humans on certain tasks. Granted, those tasks currently are very specific, but if we extrapolate 30 or 40 years into the future, we may have killing robots which can't possibly be defended against by people without comparable technology. I think it's also simply a matter of imagining the particulars of a world with sophisticated killing robots. Imagine some kind of hunter drone tracking you, finding you, and dispassionately killing you. Do you want to live in that kind of world? Would you want to suffer that kind of fate?

EGreg 8y ago
How would comparable technology protect against swarms of drones designed to track down specific people or even worse just a large swath of people?
latch 8y ago
> Because people take pause I generally agree, especially if the bar is "taking pause", but playing the devil's advocate, is this _really_ true. They pay lip service to it. They weigh the politics of it. But I feel that between the Vietnam war and the 2nd Iraq war we can at least question the degree of their concern. Project 100,000 is a specific example I'd point to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
- davesque 8y ago
  I'm sure there are counterexamples to my statement but I personally believe that it is true that most people would struggle with knowingly sending soldiers to their death. It's just my opinion.
  - lostgame 8y ago
    There are those who believe that a death in protection of their country is honourable, and those who believe whatever number of people are sacrificed in the name of their flag to be worth it. I can't imagine it, but they do exist.

sooheon 8y ago

You won't send machines to die, you send them to kill other humans.

shakna 8y ago

A well armed state sending an effecient army of machines against a less-well armed state makes for some power-problems, and it isn't machine-vs-machine. It's going to be machine-vs-people-who-can't-afford-machines. Imagine the first Gulf-War if the USA didn't have to care about how many of their own people were dying. It makes it easier for scorched-earth policies. ... Then take one more step. Many military advances are then handed down to the services like the police. It doesn't matter if you have the right to bear arms if the rather cheaper machines outnumber you, and can outgun you. Governments have a serious problem with scope creep. They promise things will only ever be used for one thing, and definitely not the other thing... Until the next government takes over. Or in the case of the current US government, tomorrow.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

This is my take on it. A government with an AI army is free to suppress its populace. A government with a human army may suppress its populace, but the army can refuse to do so. Civilian control of the military, and a military that is composed of citizens (particularly in a democratic republic) may not choose to obey an order to suppress fellow citizens. An AI army would (presumably) have no conscience.

abecedarius 8y ago
Note that this point matters even short of full automation: the fewer people a state needs to rely on, the more tyrannical it can be. (Yes, there have been plenty of horrors with mass participation.)

King-Aaron 8y ago

It's not an argument of sending men to die instead of machines. It's an argument about sending machines to conduct an incredibly asymmetrical and highly efficient method of dispatching humans with reduced oversight and ability to determine if particular orders are controversial or not (Arkhipov comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov)

simion314 8y ago

It is not about morality in the case you describe but in the potential of having more wars and victims, some of my reasons I dislike the idea are: - in a democracy you need to convince the society that they should give their lives so you need to have or invent a good enough reason, this means you can't start a war easy. - humans trust computers too much this days, one example was a person that almost drove over a cliff because Google map told him to do it, he noticed for a while that something is not right but trusted the computer more then himself. - humans can think and most of the time take good decisions and avoid pointless deaths, I am thinking at a Russian soldier that could have launched a nuclear strike because some faulty "sensors" a computer would have just done it. - there was a case posted here on HN where a german pilot decided not to destroy a damaged enemy plane because he saw the enemy pilot and he could not just kill, aka most humans do not like killing where a killer robot would have no problem killing children, wounded soldiers,doctors.

Mc_Big_G 8y ago

Men don't have the potential to all have the same bug or get hacked which causes them to kill anything that moves.