COMMENTARY
A NEW NORMAL
As AI technology advances, so does the need for a serious discus- sion about the moral and ethical implications of it—one that considers current morals and ethics and accounts for how those societal norms will shift over time. (Image by Getty Images)
helps identify targets by classifying people in view as threats or nonthreats as well as indicating the relative location of “friend- lies” and mission objectives.
Networking capabilities will further allow automated coordi- nation to assign priority targets to individual Soldiers so that all targets are eliminated as efficiently as possible and time is not wasted by having multiple Soldiers engage the same target. Networked smart weapons will also allow logistics systems to automatically initiate resupply actions as soon as combat begins, providing just-in-time logistics all the way to the forward edge. Supply and transportation assets will be able to begin rerouting truckloads of supplies across the battlespace to the point of need. At the tactical level, small robots will be able to bring loaded magazines to individual Soldiers as their weapons reach the end of their basic combat load.
TOUGH ETHICAL QUESTIONS All the above is coming in the next 10 to 20 years. Te technol- ogy exists, and it is simply a matter of time, development effort and cost-benefit ratios.
Even more automation is possible in the future. DOD and society at large will be faced with complex questions as this technology continues to grow. For example, it is already possible to include AI safety features that can prevent a weapon from firing at certain
“wrong” targets—that is, not firing at targets the AI system does not classify as an “enemy”—to decrease collateral damage or to prevent enemy use of friendly weapons. Tis, however, raises a very interesting question: What does it mean for a weapon to be fail-safe? What error rate makes it “safe” for a weapon to poten- tially not fire when a Soldier pulls the trigger?
Some have raised concerns about increasing autonomy in weapon systems. Groups such as the Campaign to Ban Killer Robots and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control have
called for total bans on the research and development of autono- mous weapons and for limiting AI research to civilian uses only.
Such calls for a ban on development of autonomous lethal weap- ons, however well-meaning, seem to ignore the fact that the technology they most seek to prevent (autonomous machines that indiscriminately kill humans) already exists. Autonomous armaments that can find and kill humans will appear on the battlefield, even if not introduced by the United States or another major state, because the required technology is already available.
Te reason we do not see major armies deploying such systems is because of a lack of the ability to discriminate between legiti- mate and illegitimate targets. Research and development in this area is in its infancy and is intertwined with needed policy deci- sions about how to precisely define a legitimate military target. Stopping research into autonomous weapons now will not prevent “slaughterbots” that indiscriminately kill; it will only prevent responsible governments from developing systems that can differentiate legitimate military targets from noncombatants and protect innocent lives.
WHAT ABOUT HUMAN ERROR? We must consider the fact that humans make mistakes about using lethal weapons in combat. Te U.S. bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in October 2015 and the hundreds of thousands of civilian casual- ties in Iraq and Afghanistan attest to this reality.
We essentially still have the same “version 1.0” human that has existed for roughly 200,000 years, and capability development in humans is relatively flat. Our decision-making error rate in life- or-death situations is likely to be constant. Machine accuracy, on the other hand, is improving at an exponential rate. At some time in the future, machine accuracy at making combat-kill decisions will surpass human accuracy. When that occurs, it raises a host
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