Researchers Creating “Ethical Governor” For Military Robots

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 22 of May , 2009 at 2:55 am

After all the hullabaloo a little while ago about military robots going out of control and killing everyone and their babies (which has since been replaced with swine flu hysteria, if you hadn’t noticed), a professor from Georgia Tech has actually started working on something relevant to what could be, but isn’t yet, an issue. Ronald Arkin is working on what he calls an “ethical governor” for combat robots, which will be a software package that defines what actions the robot is allowed to take, and when, based on the same set of standards that human troops are trained to use.

He argues not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers. “Ultimately these systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make,” said Arkin. “Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives.”

“Robots don’t have an inherent right to self-defense and don’t get scared,” said Arkin. “The robots can take greater risk and respond more appropriately.” Fear might influence human decision-making, but math rules for robots. Simplified, various actions can be classified as ethical or unethical, and assigned a certain value. Starting with a lethal action and subtracting the various ethical responses to the situation equals an unethical response. Other similar equations governor the various possible actions. The difficult thing is to determine what types of actions go into those equations, and for that humans will be necessary, and ultimately responsible for.

If you remember, this is pretty much exactly what we were saying back in March. To some extent, I think this could be an oversimplified approach (although it may just be that the source article is oversimplifying)… Having an ethical rule structure is great and all, but part of the problem with the sort of combat that humans (and robots) are finding themselves in is that there are all kinds of things going on that don’t really lend themselves to ethical rule structures. This isn’t yet a problem for the robots, though, since they’ve all still got a human in the loop somewhere. We’ll have to wait and see what happens over the next couple years as humans begin to get phased out.

VIA [ Discovery News ]

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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Military

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1 Comment

Comment by Alex

Made Friday, 22 of May , 2009 at 11:52 am

I know that military robots are practical and all, but I can’t help but feel a little sad that killing machines are where the money’s at in robotics research in America.

Comment by Spencer

Made Monday, 26 of October , 2009 at 4:35 am

If I might conjecture the reasons for this, from what I see and hear, everyone else is too scared of robots to put too much into them. The possible ethical, legal and psychological repercussions are unknown to us at this point. Except for military robots because everyone knows what they will be doing, thanks to Hollywood (although I personally think we would have been better off without that base understanding). Until people know what they are to do with robotics systems no one will want to put their toes in the water.