Can a Robot Be Moral?

Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert and ethicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, thinks it may be possible to include in robotic warfare devices (such as drones) an "ethical governor" function, which he predicts could save more civilian lives than human soldiers. Such a function would have other purposes, too:

A year after seeing the Apache helicopter video in 2005, Mr. Arkin, the Georgia Tech roboticist, won a three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Office for a project with a stated goal of producing "an artificial conscience" to guide robots in the battlefield independent of human control. The project resulted in a decision-making architecture that Mr. Arkin says could potentially lead to ethically superior robotic warriors within as few as 10 to 20 years, assuming the program is given full financial support.

"I'm not talking about replacing war fighters one for one," he says. "I'm talking about designing very narrow, very specific machines for certain tasks that will work alongside human war fighters to carry out particular types of operations that humans don't do particularly well at, such as building-clearing operations."

Rather than risking one's own life to protect noncombatants who may or may not be behind a door, Mr. Arkin says, a soldier "might have a propensity to roll a grenade through there first ... and there may be women and children in that room." A robot could enter the room and gauge the level of threat from up close, eliminating the risk to a soldier.

Others in the scientific community say that would be unethical:

Wallach has advocated establishing as a first step an international humanitarian principle stating that machines should not be making "decisions" to kill humans. In June he began circulating a proposal that calls for an executive order against the development of "autonomous lethal-force-initiating systems." He says that getting the president to declare that the United States will not create such weaponry could prompt NATO to jump on board as well.

"It's a very specific strategy on how to move forward," Mr. Wallach says. "You establish under international humanitarian law the principle that this is not an appropriate form of warfare. It becomes comparable to biological weaponry, gas warfare, lasers on the battlefield, other things that have now been declared immoral, inappropriate in warfare."

(Image: "Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert and ethicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has proposed that warrior robots with an "ethical governor" function could preserve more civilian lives than human soldiers can." Via Pouya Dianat, The Chronicle)