Jerry Kaplan makes a reasoned argument in favor of AI-based weapons systems, mostly pointing out that human beings aren’t particularly discerning about who they target in the heat of battle, and that dumb weapons – like land mines – maim and kill indiscriminately, too.
And then, there’s the moral argument:
Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.
Of course, there are all sorts of caveats. The technology has to be as effective as a human soldier. It has to be fully controllable. All this needs to be demonstrated, of course, but presupposing the answer is not the best path forward. In any case, a ban wouldn’t be effective. As the authors of the letter recognize, A.I. weapons aren’t rocket science; they don’t require advanced knowledge or enormous resource expenditures, so they may be widely available to adversaries that adhere to different ethical standards.
The world should approach A.I. weapons as an engineering problem — to establish internationally sanctioned weapons standards, mandate proper testing and formulate reasonable post-deployment controls — rather than by forgoing the prospect of potentially safer and more effective weapons.
Instead of turning the planet into a “Terminator”-like battlefield, machines may be able to pierce the fog of war better than humans can, offering at least the possibility of a more humane and secure world. We deserve a chance to find out.
I am not a starry-eyed idealist in this domain. I believe that states should retain the right to wage war, for example. The case that we are obliged to send in robots in the stead of people, if they can be controlled, seems almost unarguable, given a justified casus belli.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/126906299502