Military Robotics  Governing Lethal Behavior in Robots  Posted
28 Jan 2008 at 22:11 UTC by steve Share This  A new technical
report on the design of ethical autonomous military robots comes
to us from an usual source, security expert Bruce Schneier's
blog. Coincidentally, Schneier just won the Norbert Wiener Award
for outstanding contributions to social responsibility in
computing technology. The report in question is "Governing
Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid
Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture" (PDF format), from
researchers at the Georgia Tech Mobile Robot Lab. A formalized
ethical representation and control structure is described.
Readers may also be interested in a more recent publication from
Georgia Tech, "Lethality and Autonomous Systems: Survey Design
and Results" (PDF format), a survey of the general public,
military, roboticists, and policy makers on ethical issues of
autonomous military robots. The results show that most people
believe human soldiers should be held responsible f