Governing Lethal Behavior in Robots

[RoboGuy]

A new technical report on the design of ethical autonomous militaryrobots comesto us from an usual source, security expert BruceSchneier's blog. Coincidentally, Schneier just won theNorbertWiener Award for outstanding contributions to social responsibility incomputing technology. The report in question is "GoverningLethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/ReactiveRobot Architecture" (PDF format), from researchers at the Georgia Tech Mobile RobotLab. A formalized ethical representation and control structure isdescribed. Readers may also be interested in a more recent publicationfrom Georgia Tech, "Lethalityand Autonomous Systems: Survey Design and Results" (PDF format), asurvey of the general public, military, roboticists, and policy makerson ethical issues of autonomous military robots. The results show thatmost people believe human soldiers should be held responsible for theirlethal mistakes. However, when an autonomous robot makes a lethalmistake, no one seems to know who to blame. Many blame militarycommanders, politicians, androboticists, with only a few blaming the robot itself.Those surveyed also felt that military robots should be designed to feelsympathy and guilt but not anger.

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