It sounds like the sermon Noel Sharkey preached last month about the ethics of autonomous systems has been really necessary. The time-frame we are talking about here is smaller than one might think - I suspect just 10-15 more years and we will see autonomously shooting robots. If there is a war at that time and morality debates fail, that is.

A reporter from Popular Mechanics visited an U.S. Army test area in Texas recently and wrote about the demonstration of the “MULE”, a six-wheeled utility vehicle, which is currently remote controlled by an Xbox 360 controller, but the developers at Lockheed Martin plan to include autonomous movement by the scheduled release date 2014. Already 1700 of these Humvee sized beasts have been ordered by the U.S. Army, and while they say that the use of the mounted weapons (4 antitank missiles and a machine gun) in this generation of robots will always have to be initiated by a human controller, I suspect that this will be “optional” in future versions. Maybe in the form of a bAutoFire = false; that can easily be overridden in desperate situations after shouting a key phrase like It’s coming right for us!

The article questions the readiness of the robots for battle, and comes to the conclusion that there’s still a long way to go and the robots are still clumsy and slow. However, the hardware is completely ready for battle (and probably has been for a while). It is just the software that is still missing. Just some little intelligent pathfinding, friend/foe distinction, an aimbot and a wallhack and we’re all set!

Well, of course it is not that easy. Indeed, the artificial intelligence is by far the most difficult problem these robots face, and as mentioned, it’ll take another couple of years until we see reliable algorithms that prevent friendly fire (My guess would be that they come up with a hardware based solution first, an active transmitter or reflector that indicates a friend. However, that could become problematic when soldiers are captured.)

Eventually, the software side will be solved, and only the ethical issue will remain. War ethics are a difficult terrain and probably won’t count for a lot when an officer sees his soldiers at risk and decides to push the button. The huge budget of the U.S. Army lures researchers and universities like Carnegie Mellon to put their brainpower to use on modern AI, AI that will be used to control weapons to kill people.

Now I’ve rambled along way too much again, time to finish up. I’ll increase the AI Panic Level by +1% (not more because I’ve already credited the general risk of autonomous army robots in the post about Noel Sharkey).

 Addition (March 22nd, 2008): There are also flying prototypes, like that bat spy plane shown below. The U.S. Army awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five-year, $10-million grant to construct and build it. While it sure is more difficult to build a flying object than an earthbound robot, the challenges lie more in the physical realization than in a better AI.

Unmanned flying drones are in use by the military already and have been used in Iraq to fire missiles and collect terrain information.

Thanks Igor Gabrielan and Erk Subasi for letting me know!
If you see something in the net that would make a good AI Panic article, feel free to contact me!

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