Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at Georgia Tech, has received grants from the military to study how to equip robots with a set of moral rules. “My main goal is to reduce the number of noncombatant casualties in warfare,” he says. His lab developed what he calls an “ethical adapter” that helps the robot emulate guilt. It’s set in motion when the program detects a difference between how much destruction is expected when using a particular weapon and how much actually occurs. If the difference is too great, the robot’s guilt level reaches a certain threshold, and it stops using the weapon. Arkin says robots sometimes won’t be able to parse more complicated situations in which the right answer isn’t a simple shoot/don’t shoot decision. But on balance, he says, they will make fewer mistakes than humans, whose battlefield behavior is often clouded by panic, confusion or fear.
A robot’s lack of emotion is precisely what makes many people uncomfortable with the idea of trying to give it human characteristics. Death by robot is an undignified death, Peter Asaro, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said in a speech in May at a United Nations conference on conventional weapons in Geneva. A machine “is not capable of considering the value of those human lives” that it is about to end, he told the group. “And if they’re not capable of that and we allow them to kill people under the law, then we all lose dignity, in the way that if we permit slavery, it’s not just the suffering of those whoareslaves butallof humanity that suffers the indignity that there are any slaves at all.” The U.N.willtakeupquestions about the uses of autonomous weapons again in April.