Should We Fear Military Robots?

    • Publish Date: Nov 14 2018 3:54PM
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    • Updated Date: Nov 14 2018 5:03PM
Should We Fear Military Robots?

A US army general has said that machines like “drones and robots could replace one-fourth of combat soldiers by 2030.” Smart machines have great potential to execute tedious and dangerous tasks like mine removal and surveillance with ease. They won’t mind extreme cold or heat. But many experts  are worried about the possible deployment of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) —otherwise called killer robots. Here’s why...

What is the scenario now?

In the air, on land and at sea, military robots are proliferating. The US is already using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), to conduct surveillance and drop bombs on terrorist hideouts in faraway places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The arguments in support of drone strikes is that they save military lives and minimise collateral damage. Drones are pilotless aircraft operated remotely. A foreign security expert has said that “they are the least of all evils.” High-flying drones such as the MQ-9 Predator can stay in the air for 14 hours at a stretch while carrying more than half a ton of laser-guided bombs and missiles. Operating drones is shockingly similar to playing video games. A drone operator sits comfortably in a military base thousands of kilometers from ‘ground zero’ in front of a large screen with joysticks in hand. A press of a button…and boom…the target is destroyed. There is no need to put boots on the grounds. But such drones —and many other robots ranging from truck to pebble size— operates under direct human supervision. What we are talking about, however, is fully automated machines that can select targets (humans and non-humans) without human supervision. As of now the artificial intelligence needed for robots to act as autonomous killing devices does not yet exists. But, because of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), experts worry that the technology will soon cross a threshold where machines will decide who lives and who dies. Autonomous weapons have been described as “the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

Which countries are building automated soldiers/ machines?

No country is going to formally acknowledge that it’s producing robots which will be explicitly mandated to kill humans in military confrontations. But activists say many advanced countries are investing in developing such technology. A few years back, the U.S. Department of Defense released its policy around how autonomous weapons should be used if they were to be deployed in the battlefield. The policy limits how they should operate, but definitely doesn’t ban them. Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said: “Although autonomous weapons systems have not yet been deployed and the extent of their development as a military technology remains unclear, discussion of such questions must begin immediately and not once the technology has been developed and proliferated.”

The issue of accountability

A still from the movie Terminator Salvation

The revolution in military robotics does have an achilles heel. As robots become more autonomous, identifying a human to hold accountable for a bloody blunder will become tricky. Should the buck stop at the robot’s handler, manufacturer, programmer or should the entire chain be blamed? It’s tough to single out one person. Ban Ki-moon has also raised similar concerns, “If their use results in a war crime or serious human rights violation, who would be legally responsible? If responsibility cannot be determined as required by international law, is it legal or ethical to deploy such systems?” he asked. 

What about setting rules for robots?

Right now, we don’t have any rules to govern AI and robots. However, there have been attempts to create a set of rules to ensure friendly robot behaviour. Certainly the most famous attempt to create a set of laws for robots to date is Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The science fiction author stated these laws in his 1942 short story “Runaround.” Asimov’s three laws are as following:




But there are others who argue that laws should be made for humans not robots. The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is one of the few organisations that has tried to create a set of practical rules for robots, but it quickly realised that laws for robots are not viable. Its website says: “Asimov’s laws are inappropriate because they try to insist that robots behave in certain ways, as if they were people, when in real life, it is the humans who design and use the robots who must be the actual subjects of any law.” It further elaborates, “How can a robot understand and obey all human orders, when even people get confused about what instructions mean?”

Part Man, Part Machine

A still from the movie RoboCop

In the movie Robocop (2014) Michael Keaton’s character says, “Americans don’t want a machine. They want a product with a conscience. They want something that knows what it feels like to be human. We’re gonna put a man inside a machine.” This is where cyborg human soldiers comes in the picture. Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England in an interview to a website describes a cyborg as “a human enhanced well above the norm by technology which is integral to the body – particularly integral to the nervous system/brain.” Different divisions of the US armed forces are working on developing high-tech armour—a kind of exoskeleton that will give soldiers enhanced vision, increased body strength, improved speed and amplified situational awareness. While enhancing human soldiers may have its benefits, it opens up a web of ethical, political, and legal dilemmas. For example, in a democratic society, is it right to bestow an individual with such superhuman abilities? 

Share your views in the comments section below.

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Mokshda Sharma Subodh Public School, airport

India would be standing up high in the sky if we will be successful enough to contribute our part in this kind of development but on the contrary we also need to think about the negative senerio of the same.

Rakshita.C.S Amara Jyothi English School

It will be such a great honor to do these great inventions but we can''t completely rely on them and even the jobs for people become less. So there''s equal positive and negative effects.




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