I caught this article over on Drudge about military robots, and lost it when I read this [emphasis mine]:

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

“They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. [...]

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders “are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war,” he said.

That’s an out and out lie. I have a close friend who is an engineer, designing robots for the military. And he says that though the engineers would like to have the ability to let the robot fire autonomously, it’s the military brass who insist on looping a human into that decision making process.

So what could motivate this clown to assert the exact opposite? I couldn’t find anything on the guy’s home page or Wikipedia page to indicate his political leanings or any long standing sort of activism. But I did find his Guardian article on which this AFP piece appears to be based:

But fully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda. The US National Research Council advises “aggressively exploiting the considerable warfighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles”. They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground.

That sounds like a bad inference and a quote taken out of context. The Guardian doesn’t provide a link to the US National Research Council piece that is quoted (natch) nor do they even say who that council is (I’ve for one have never heard of them).

So I guess it’s hard to say whether or not this is just publicity seeking from a loudmouth professor, or some sort of anti-military agenda (though he does want an international agreement banning robots from making lethal decisions). Whatever it is, it’s bunk.

Tags: Military, Noel Sharkey, Robots

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