Killer Robots

Humane Warfare?

Humans seem to be trying to make warfare more humane by using robots to kill. Am I the only one that thinks this is a terrible idea?

Two of these Phantom MK1 robots (they cost about $100,000 each) were reported to be deployed in February in Ukraine. In theory they were limited to only “supply carrying tasks” but that in five to ten years they will be fully combat capable.

Time magazine reports: “And on this late February morning, it brandishes assorted high-powered weaponry: a revolver, pistol, shotgun, and replica of an M-16 rifle.”

We’ve seen previous reports that Ukraine actually used (different) robots to capture a position (Russian soldiers surrendering to robots).

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to see humanity eliminate war instead of turning it over to robots to conduct. What are the moral implications if robots are killing humans (the other side doesn’t have robots to fight back with)?

Certainly we can use the excuse: “If we don’t do it, our enemies will.” But is that really a good excuse?

Perhaps we should pull the plug on funding wars rather than escalating them?

Trying to be practical, we should rename the “Department of War” back to the “Department of Defense”. The USA should lead the world in de-escalation. Cut our military budget to set an example and allow other nations to also cut their military budgets. Focus on defence only. Take an attitude of “woe be to any nation that actually attacks us” with a clear statement that if a nation attacks us, we won’t just defend ourselves, but we will then proceed to conquer and eliminate that aggressive nation.

We should engage with other nations only in diplomatic efforts and use economic incentives to encourage the other nations to behave as we wish. This could be a hard pill to swallow for many, as we don’t agree with the way other nations conduct their internal affairs, but we must keep foremost in our minds that every human has a different viewpoint. It’s not morally just to impose our viewpoints on anyone else.

To quote Time magazine: “An additional worry is that AI is far from perfect. As anyone who has used ChatGPT or Google Gemini knows, LLMs make mistakes, known as hallucinations, all the time, as generative tools confidently produce false, misleading, or nonsensical information not based on training data.”

Even if a killer robot doesn’t hallucinate, is this really the future we want?

“Human Warfare” seems like an oxymoron to me.