3 ms·

Stopping killer robots

• tlb 13y ago
  As the article explains, the main rule of civilized war is to attack only military targets and not civilians. The authors think robots will be worse at this: "Technical limitations mean robots could not reliably distinguish civilians from combatants, particularly in irregular warfare, and could not fulfill the requirement to judge proportionality." On the contrary, I think robot soldiers will be much better at not hurting civilians. Human soldiers are actually very bad at this, as a century of televised atrocities have shown. Robot soldiers are: - capable of waiting to be fired upon before returning fire - auditable, so mistakes can be corrected or avoided next time - have a clear chain of command, so the military can't deny responsibility for war crimes - not motivated by fear, revenge or cruelty