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Lethal robots are not a technology that can really be regulated by ban. It's not like nuclear weapons, where you need a huge industrial operation with tens of

• rhizome31 8y ago
  IANAL but does it matter whether it can be enforced or not? There are plenty of types of crimes that cannot be easily detected or prevented and are indeed committed at high rates. But they are still forbidden and should remain so.
  • johnisgood 8y ago
    So what exactly is the point?
    • delinka 8y ago
      Consequences. You risk suffering the consequences if you commit a crime. Society deems something as Bad (calling it crime), punishes those who commit crime. We’re hoping society agrees that making autonomous lethal robots should be Bad and deserve punitive consequences. And hopefully, those who commit this crime will be caught and suffer the consequences.
      • ptero 8y ago
        IMO having any law that is rarely enforced is a bad idea. That gives authorities the choice of whom to pursue and whom to let go, which is often used to hound parties (people, groups or countries) for arbitrary reasons citing the law in question as a reason for persecution. Laws should be clear and non-burdensome for the majority. And violations caught at the high rate. My 2c.
        • rhizome31 8y ago
          A typical example of a crime that is very rarely punished is rape. I hope you'll agree that it should nevertheless remain banned.
          • Nasrudith 8y ago
            There is a difference between rarely enforced and rarely punished. In antiquity before forensics if someone murdered someone on a country road and cleaned their clothes and cleaned or disposed of their weapon nobody would ever know who did it without a confession. However if they saw someone murdering a man in the street they would mob the assailant and capture or kill him. The first case they may bury bodies and set an armed patrol of some sort for roving bandits but the murderer would never be punished per say. However if nearly everyone drinks and alcohol is illegal but bars operate openly yeah that law is bad it is only being used as a pretext.
          • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
            It's rarely punished because it's hard to prosecute. When an actionable case is dropped in a prosecutor's lap they're happy to take it to court.
        • teawrecks 8y ago
          No one said don't enforce it, they said it's difficult to enforce. Those are very different.
        • dwighttk 8y ago
          eh... I'm glad there is a speed limit on the road in front of my house even though a lot of people drive 10 mph faster.
          • ptero 8y ago
            OK, but in a similar situation (speed limit that most people exceed by 5-10 mph), I would prefer that the speed limit was raised by 5 mph, and then enforced all time time (e.g., via a well-calibrated speed camera), not randomly when the town needs extra cash and places a traffic cop nearby to extract a tax.
      • mc32 8y ago
        In principle yes, but what happens when a pariah state like Venezuela or Iran decide to do this, no amount of international ostracizing and sanctions will deter them. What leverage are you going to use to enforce this?
      • ataturk 8y ago
        True, but like with all these stupid gun laws, people are just ignoring them now. The left blew its wad. The left wants all drugs to be legal and holds up people who break drug laws to be some kind of heroes. The left wants to let rampant illegal immigration take place, in other words, they want to treat our legal system like the Old Country Buffet, pick and choose what they want from it. But when it comes to a civil right, the right to self preservation, or free speech, all of a sudden you're a madman if you don't abide by the ridiculous laws. Yeah, whatever.
      • Mirioron 8y ago
        Society only punishes you if society knows about it and has enough power to do something about it. If the US signs a treaty to ban killer robots but builds them anyway then nobody can force them to stop.
        • reitanqild 8y ago
          But then the rest of the world can agree it was evil. Just like the world can mostly agree it was evil to arrange a civil war in Eastern Ukraine or invade Iraq etc etc: There will always be people who more or less genuinely argue that the last invasion of Iraq was necessary or that a certain superpower next to Ukraine has nothing to do with the well supplied rebels in their back yard. For the rest of us we can all agree to despise both of these.
          • ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
            I don't think the World agrees that it was evil to invade Iraq. A lot of the World participated in that invasion actually... At the end of the day Saddam was not exactly a peaceful dictator. I think hacker news should be above inflammatory posts like these.
            • reitanqild 8y ago
              Have my upvote. I did not intend it to be inflammatory, in fact I rewrote it once before posting to make sure it wasn't. I posted something I was sure most HN-ers could agree on, - but as someone who frequently disagrees with many of you I probably should have known better.
        • atoav 8y ago
          This is to binary IMO. I think imany ban is about increasing the cost of a certain behaviour and by these means decreasing the likelyhood of an actor to adopt it. No human agreement will ever be able to stop a 100% of anything. But that doesn’t imply it isn’t worth increasing the cost (financial, social and otherwise) to certain types of behaviour. People seem to agree quite uniformly with banning and punishing murder for example, although these laws and punishments don’t seem to stop murder as has been proven over centuries. Few would murder their neighbour over a small dispute, because the cost for doing so is extremely high. Much more people would e.g. kill the rapist of their child, because the notion of cost might be irrelevant under such circumstances and it is much more socially acceptable to do so. Of course there is more than just cost. It can also be a matter of culture. If you live in a culture were getting shot for miniscule reasons is not something that happens, you are also far less likely to see shooting at somebody for miniscule reasons as an option
    • rhizome31 8y ago
      The point is that when people get caught they can be sent to court and sentenced. Some people are scared of that and don't do the forbidden thing. Take the act of stealing for example. It is ridiculously easy to do and indeed it is committed a lot. Yet most societies prefer to ban it, hoping that fear of sentence will prevent some people to do it.
    • atoav 8y ago
      The point is that we were able to mostly get rid of chemical weapons and landmines, which is also not easy to enforce. The effectiveness of enforcement is no argument.
      • Just_Smith 8y ago
        It is indeed an argument, and the idea that the laws around landmines and chemical weapons are what caused them to occur less is very selective reasoning. Those two cases are weapons that have a blowback towards those who wield them (Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan are still cleaning up landmines), and it's just as likely that their diminishing was due to there being less costly ways to kill people. Inability to enforce is exactly why prohibition has been a colossal failure, so how is the ability to enforce irrelevant to a law's success?
        • sergioj97 8y ago
          I don't think he has said it was irrelevant. He said it was no argument for not banning them.
        • atoav 8y ago
          Things like these are hard to judge, but a ban is a sign of intent and not a perfect solution to prevent a certain situation. We collectively agree to ban certain things (e.g. murder), because there are multiple reasons to do so. Some of these reasons are humanitarian, some rational, some economic etc. Yet we see proof each day that neither laws nor punishment will stop murder from happening. The idea of a ban is not to stop things — but to increase the (social, economical, ...) cost of certain behaviour. Any actor who fears that cost will abstain from chemical weapons for example. But just like with murder you will always have actors that either decide it is a prize worth taking, or they never ever thought about it at all. Hard to say how effective those bans were, but they certainly helped to nudge some actors into adopting higher standards. And once there is a standard the majority agrees on it is hard to go back to a lower standard..
        • hutzlibu 8y ago
          "and it's just as likely that their diminishing was due to there being less costly ways to kill people." Politicaly costly, as more and more people pressured for more human ways of war. Because mines are a very effective and cheap military strategy. (where mines are you don't need so much troops). I say it was the boulevard pictures of children without legs, that did it. And maybe will so again after the first killbots gone rouge.. Because I doubt any big military would miss out the opportunity to at least be able to flip the switch to let them operate and shoot autonom, when you have more cheap massproduced robots than operators and need them and or the enemy is jamming you and the situation is critical.
  • Nasrudith 8y ago
    There is an older theory of law that only things which are enforcable (which detectability is a requirement for) should be illegal otherwise it only breeds contempt for the law. This was way back when the concerns were more "could a king enforce it" than any notion of natrual rights. Personally I think that philosophy is not wrong at very least even if other valid frameworks could exist.
• ForHackernews 8y ago
  There's a big difference between a jerry-rigged bomb strapped to a quadcopter and a purpose-built killbot produced by a nation state. Strong international sanctions against warbots are a good idea, even if it won't prevent every terrorist from making their own low-rent version.
  • swarnie_ 8y ago
    > There's a big difference between a jerry-rigged bomb strapped to a quadcopter and a purpose-built killbot produced by a nation state Aren't we already there thought? Don't the US already have semi-autonomous flying kill-driods? The ones that occasional crash Pakistani weddings unannounced.
    • epochwolf 8y ago
      If you count ICBMs, we’ve had them at least since the 1960s. For more targeted strikes with conventional explosives, we started using Tomahawk Cruise Missiles in 1991 during the Gulf War.
      • Recurecur 8y ago
        Those aren't autonomous weapons in the sense meant here. Both of what you mention attack a predetermined target - a target selected by humans. This technology is about "smart weapons" going out and searching for targets. For instance, the Chinese helicopter drone I mentioned in another post could easily be fitted with an IR sensor, and could probably hit targets out to ~200 meters with the AK. One challenge is IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), but if you just want the drone(s) to kill all "enemies" within a certain boundary that'd be easy. AK ammo is even cheap, unlike the $500K missiles we often use to blow up individual jihadis... And of course, at any time a human could potentially take control or at least monitor activity.
    • adrianN 8y ago
      Those are lethal but non-autonomous weapons afaik. A human pulls the trigger.
  • 8y ago
• empath75 8y ago
  You don’t even need to make a change to hardware. Fly a big enough drone into a building and it’s lethal.
  • giancarlostoro 8y ago
    You could do that with a regular privately owned airplane too, and arguably more damage.
    • zaarn 8y ago
      Yes but you can build or buy drones in much larger quantities for cheap. With enough planning you could target weakpoints in the structure and bring down a large building more reliably than with an airplane and with less loss of life (on your side).
    • hannasanarion 8y ago
      but without sacrificing any of your people, or even needing people to be involved. If US drones were autonomous, then somebody could press the "destroy islamabad" button and they'd all take off, fire all their missiles, and crash into buildings on their own, with no humans involved. That's the kind of capability we want to avoid. Robots are cheap, people are not.
      • isostatic 8y ago
        > Robots are cheap, people are not. Depends on the country
• detaro 8y ago
  Landmines are easy to make too, still it's worthwhile to ban their use.
  • scotty79 8y ago
    Are they banned? Does the ban do anything? I think USA has huge pile of banned weapons like bio and chemical weapons.
    • kkarakk 8y ago
      ban is on use and not on stockpiling. it's all legal distinctions to avoid incurring penalties in the global economy. wars aren't even fought in the open anymore,you fight them via proxy "liberations" in failed nation states. for eg russia vs europe/usa vs iran vs saudi arabia in syria or china vs india via pakistan
      • Nasrudith 8y ago
        Also annoyingly biological weaponry requires specimens to create countermeasures like vaccines and antibodies. Even smallpox we have kept on ice and are debating if it should be incinerated to reduce the relatively minuscule escape chance or kept on ice in case we need to make more vaccines. Hypothetically being able to digitize and compile it would allow incineration of every bioweapon but it comes with its own dilemma. The one advantage is that if it comes out of bits and into pathogens it was definitely deliberate. The disadvantage of course is that it can be printed with the right equipment.
    • warmwaffles 8y ago
      > I think USA has huge pile of banned weapons like bio and chemical weapons. This is not necessarily true. We are disposing of them and last time I checked there are only two sites now that have weapons and their numbers are decreasing daily. Sites that have since disposed of all weapons that I know about. 1. Johnston Island 2. Umatilla, Oregon 3. Little Rock, Arkansas source: my father has been doing this for 29 years
• harrumph 8y ago
  >Lethal robots are not a technology that can really be regulated by ban. Bans aren't merely about regulating technology, they're about regulating human behavior by introducing consequences. They're about a society making a choice to introduce legal sanctions against persons who do something unambiguously reckless and destructive, such as handing an autonomous device the power to kill. Responses that boil down to a shrug of the shoulders underscore an important observation: enthusiasts for technology are precisely the wrong people to ask about the importance of recklessness and risk. It's on par with asking someone in software sales for a warts-and-all perspective on their product.
  • dTal 8y ago
    One thing I've noticed is that the type of hacker-person one often finds on HN - the kind of person who looks at the world in terms of what is technically possible - has a gaping blind spot when it comes to the distinction between "anyone could do this" and "everyone can do this". The infamous Dropbox announcement thread is instructive - your average hacker type poo poos it because it's trivial, but its existence still changes the world in meaningful ways. There is a huge qualitative difference between "anyone could put a gun on a quadcopter" and "everyone can buy a quadcopter with a gun on it".
    • harrumph 8y ago
      >gaping blind spot when it comes to the distinction between "anyone could do this" and "everyone can do this" Agree. These are exactly the enormously important subtleties that are lost when education omits training in the humanities.
• scotty79 8y ago
  I think blinding lasers are even easier to make and they are still banned.
• taneq 8y ago
  > Tesla and Waymo Tesla and Uber, you mean. Unless there's been an incident with Waymo that I'm not aware of?
  • hannasanarion 8y ago
    You're right, I was thinking of the Phoenix accident, I'd forgot that was Uber, not waymo
• realcr 8y ago
  > Even the rulebreakers, like Israel, couldn't hide the fact that they were doing it and had to rely on America's UNSC veto to save them from the consequences. A bit unrelated, but I couldn't ignore it. Could you expand on this one? In what sense is Israel a rulebreaker? What are the consequences? I don't read the news very often, but I do remember there are some actors that are seemingly working towards obtaining nuclear weapons, and their leaders publicly claim they want to harm other countries. To be sure I'm not totally detached from reality I googled a bit: http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-supreme-leader-touts-9-point-plan-to-destroy-israel/?fb_comment_id=753808694666776_1619089488138688 http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-supreme-leader-touts-9-poi... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/22/iran-pledges-destroy-israel-within-25-years-tensions-rise/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/22/iran-pledges-des...
  • knightofmars 8y ago
    "The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-...
  • maeln 8y ago
    I supposed he is talking about the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [0]. Israel never signed it though (Iran did), so you cannot really called them "rule breaker" (they didn't sign the "rule"). Although, I think that not signing the treaty doesn't protect you from having sanction from the U.N. But U.S veto did protect them I guess. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
  • codyb 8y ago
    I believe GP is talking about Israel's oft denied nuclear missles program which everyone knows they have but they refuse to confirm. They're probably breaking some nuclear non proliferation treaty put into place by a bunch of nuclear powers. (Whether there's anything wrong with the people with sticks saying no sticks is a different matter). Israel definitely has nukes already, they're not working towards it.
• Symmetry 8y ago
  >Hobbyists have already mounted guns on quadcopters. ISIS has actually already used (remote controlled) quadcopters to conduct grenade strikes. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/uas/2018/01/05/how-650-drones-are-creating-problems-in-iraq-and-syria/ https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/uas/2018/01/05/how-650-dro... You can make a distinction between human-in-the-loop weapons versus human-on-the-loop supervision versus robots killing with no supervision. But of course landmines have been completely autonomous weapons since the US civil war. It's a place where it's really hard to make bright line distinctions.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    > But of course landmines have been completely autonomous weapons since the US civil war. Excellent point.
    • phkahler 8y ago
      I was going to bring up landmines but I googled it first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Ban_Landmines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Ban_... It is not a bad comparison. I can even imagine a robot/drone sent it with orders to kill everyone in a certain area. It gets lost or whatever and runs out of power. Years later some kid finds it, charges it up and turns it on...
  • robotresearcher 8y ago
    Spiked pits, poisoned wells, bear traps and caltrops have been around a whole lot longer than landmines and have most of the properties in question. This is not a new issue.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  This is a silly pedantic point... I don't think Israel (or India, Pakistan & North Korea) broke the npt rules. The treaty doesn't regulate non signatories and allows countries to withdraw from the agreement. North Korea is the recent one. They gave their 3 month notice, withdrew and tested nukes without violating the treaty. Ultimately, I don't really think the treaty was the biggest direct factor limiting proliferation. When it was signed, peaceful nuclear tech was expected to be the most important technology of the century. The treaty was supposed to exclude non-members from accessing peaceful nuclear technology. It did that quite effectively (Israel never had nuclear power for this reason). But unexpectedly, it's 2019 and nuclear energy isn't that important. The npt did help forming a consensus though, and policing that consensus outside of the treaty. Helping anyone nuclearize is taboo. Five more countries (possibly six) did develop nuclear weapons after the npt, but the barriers were pretty huge, diplomatically and technically... because they got very little help.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Helping anyone nuclearize is taboo Only because most of the nations that haven't got them but are seeking them are poor nations that don't have a lot of close friends among the nuclear nations. It's kind of a "got mine, screw you" deal. Iran and the like have just as much right to develop and hold nuclear weapons as everyone else. The thought of "regional troublemaker" having nuclear weapons countries bothers nations like the US, Russia, France, (etc) for the same reason some people at the top of the social hierarchy doesn't want poor people to have easy access to firearms. Those already at the top generally don't like seeing the playing field leveled and it's true all the way from the individual level to the national level. In a democratic society if the party you want to push around is well enough armed to hurt you back that limits your ability to push them around to cases where you are actually consider to be "in the right" by the court of public opinion otherwise the people will promptly decide that it's not worth it.
    • dalbasal 8y ago
      It's not about rich or poor. It's about whether or not you had them at the time the treaty was written. China, UK & France are in. Japan & Germany are out, because they were occupied and demilitarised at the time. Both large, rich countries. China was large, but poor at that time.
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  Sure, but we do have all sorts of laws and restrictions on chemical weapons (which you could plausibly make by pouring some of the cleaning products in your house together). The ban isn't a flip-switch that says: "hey, no more of these", it's the start of a formal dialogue over our relationship to these new technologies and how we would like to see them used on a worldwide basis. If a country were to opt to drop thousands of flying drones with guns onto a military base is that different than chemical weapons? a fuel air bomb? conventional explosives? sending special forces in? Yeah, they're all different with different repercussions, long term impacts, potential civilian casualties, etc. etc.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    Chemical, and especially biological, weapons are an order of magnitude more difficult to manufacture correctly, (ie-without killing yourself), than autonomous drones. The thought that autonomous groups like ISIS would not use autonomous drone swarms because such a terrorist attack would "break international law" really is so far beyond "fanciful" that it ventures into "humorous" territory. I think we can pretty much count on every group with a gripe reaching for autonomous drone swarms first in the future.
    • kazagistar 8y ago
      Sure, but if they can only be developed by parties who don't care for international law, they will be weaker and less effective, then they might otherwise be, and we can focus legal development efforts on countermeasures.
• WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Waymo has not killed anyone, you're thinking of Uber. Waymo has a MUCH safer/better product than Uber or these other SDC startups. Arguably Tesla's AP has only killed one of the many of thousands of drivers who use Autopilot - one of their two deaths was a guy watching Harry Potter on his laptop and not watching the road.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  Quite a lot of "banned" or restricted weapons are simple to produce: anti personnel landmines, poison gas, cluster bombs.. They do run into the problem you described. Most militaries have them. Paramilitaries and sub-state forces (even criminals) have them. They sometimes get used, even by relatively law abiding forces. Despite all that, those treaties do significantly impact their use in various ways. Diplomatic concerns do affect choices in conflict. These treaties put a diplomatic price on the use of certain weapons. They limit trade in these weapons. Weapons treaties are not about perfectly police able, and internally consistent rules. No rules of war are. That doesn't mean they are entirely worthless.
  • noir_lord 8y ago
    One way the treaties help is they reduce R&D expenditure because their is no legal market for the products which slows the progression. Not much point engineering something you can't sell. It's not a perfect solution but its a positive outcome. It also puts diplomatic and PR pressure on countries who use weapons generally prohibited which also is good. The problem generally is that technology continues to improve and the cost of doing things continues to drop. I've no idea what it would cost to build a cruise missile using off the shelf components and props instead of jets (and I'm not going to Google it) but on YouTube there are people operating remote control aircraft at long ranges with love video feedback, that's a payload away from a smart bomb already. In reality targets are soft enough that you don't need to do those kinds of things to attack a civilian area but that doesn't mean they couldn't. The recent drone at Gatwick shows the problems.
    • dalbasal 8y ago
      That's a good point. Banning weapons lessens military industries ability to produce them. They tend to be made locally, within the militaries themselves and that often means less/worse... Eg Syria/Assad.
• Zigurd 8y ago
  There are many examples of lo tech weapons that have been effectively banned. By effectively I mean they're not used by regular militaries.
• grawprog 8y ago
  Kalashnikov has already created autonomous death robots. https://newatlas.com/kalashnikov-ai-weapon-terminator-conundrum/50576/ https://newatlas.com/kalashnikov-ai-weapon-terminator-conund...
• cmurf 8y ago
  Israel is not and hasn't ever been a NPT signatory so they're not breaking the rules by having a nuclear weapons program.