Will Robots Stop Genocide?

Published January 06, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT

This Sunday's Washington Post contained a fascinating piece by GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike. In it, Pike predicts "Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle." We all know that technology's on the rise - so why does this matter?

: A Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System

Apparently, "Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace."

How? "The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return."

"No human army could withstand such an onslaught. Such an adversary would present the enemy with the simple choice of martyrdom or flight. So equipped, America's military would be irresistible in battle...

[T]he large-scale organized killing that has characterized six millenniums of human history could be ended by the fiat of the American Peace.

Genocide, and the failure of the outside word to intervene, could also become a thing of the past. The industrialized murder of the Holocaust could perhaps have been disrupted by Allied bombers, but subsequent genocides have been less institutionalized, and far less vulnerable to air power. Intervention would require infantry and a decision to accept casualties. Genocide prevention may be in the interest of our common humanity, but it has never been in the national interest. But with no body bags to explain to bewildered voters, America's leaders may be less hesitant in the future about imposing an end to atrocities in places such as Darfur."

Now, the likelihood of other countries having this same technology isn't very high. So would America be willing to send our robots into the battlefield to kill actual living, breathing people? And while Pike says that the choices are "martyrdom or surrender" he doesn't take into account the fact that so many unwilling people are conscripted into military service, and those are often the ones sent to the front lines. Will these robots be able to distinguish and help child soldiers when they go into Uganda to defeat the LRA?

I am all in favor of solutions that would help stop genocide and provide protection between genocidaires and innocent victims. But I fear that Americans would be too willing to send these robots into battle, without thinking about the potential implications.

And over at Opinio Juris, Kenneth Anderson asks: "Is it so very hard to imagine a future, and a future technology, in which it was a war crime for the human, rather than the robot, to decide to fire the weapon?"

What do you think? Could robots help create a technological Pax Americana? Would a Pax Americana be a good thing? Should we (as taxpayers, democratic citizens) encourage our government to pursue the creation of fighting robots in the hope that it will stop genocide?

Image from a 2005 MSNBC article on the deployment of Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.

This post cross-posted (with a silly personal analogy) at my new blog, Inside the Beltway & Outside the Ordinary.

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Comments (6)

Will robots stop genocide? No, they might cause it though. Why? Moore's Law predicts that the gven amount of computing power availavble for a given dollar amount doubles every 18 months. Thats impressive and apolitical. Every year, a huge number of jobs become doiable by computers for less. But humans are still the cheapest supercomputers available for many jobs. But, the number of jobs that silicon does better increases rapidly. That makes humans have to lower their wages to compete. It also makes business much more profitable because emplyees are less needed. Eventually, almost all scriptable work will be done by machines or software. Humans will preserve niches in fields where they are kept for sentimental reasons, such as the sex industry, and food service industries,

Demand may remain in the arts, and wll definitely remain in the sciences. Everybody will want to be a scientist. (which will require far more education than it does now)

Other technical jobs like medicine and law may be outsourced to practicioners in other countries who can work via high speed data links.

People will all be trying to cash in their 401ks at the same time, and the value of stock will be very little. Expect problems.

Posted by Live Simply on 01/06/2009 @ 07:40AM PT
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Militarized robots stop genocide ??? What an insane statement.So we can control & colonize even more effectively ? Who gets to control those monsters? Guaranteed they'll be used everywhere from the mexican border to Iraq and Palestine. Is this one of the giant holes the money from our treasury is disappearing into ?
What happens to any form of human rights in such a world - Good God - it's like the GMO people telling us that they are ending hunger - wow - Orwell was one very smart person . . . .

Posted by Rebekah Collins on 01/06/2009 @ 09:15AM PT
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As the youngest daughter of an Explosives Expert, please allow me to share that the robot that is pictured (designed for the Military's EOD) has bulky and tough controls, even for the experts who designed it ... it's one of the reasons they are wanting to modify the Wii controlers to help out some, but even those will have glitches and unstable reactions depending on the user ... I do not think it will ever be able to prevent genocide, aid in the process?? Absoutley, but not completely defeat by any means ... IMO, only a human with an actual heart and feeling of compassion can STOP something as horrid as Genocide ... robots, artificial intelligence or anything of the sorts, again, IMO, will do nothing but aid in the separation and extinction of the human race ... alot faster than we all want it to!

Posted by Stephanie Suggs on 01/06/2009 @ 09:19AM PT
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I've clearly absorbed way too much science fiction over the years, but all I can think is ... "Vote no on Robot Overlords!"

Still, the computing problems in using them for peacekeeping are not small. Pattern recognition software is extraordinarily difficult, add on to that what would turn into a need for facial recognition and emotional evaluation, just no, this is many years away. It isn't about raw computing power, either. It's about understanding how to program an algorithm that does what the human brain does, and among our unique supercomputing capacities is the ability to process information in real time about other humans - data whose taxonomies we ourselves don't fully understand. That we do this without thinking about it, after millions of years of evolution favoring exactly such an outcome, doesn't mean it's an easy problem to code.

You could perhaps program a robot right now to fire at any source of incoming fire, and even coordinate with other robots through wireless networking in order to spread that pattern of fire most effectively. I'm sure there are other things they could do that I'm not familiar enough with the cutting edge technology to know about. But a machine would have to be nearly a successful Turing machine in order to fill the roles suggested by the article and I very much doubt we're there yet.

The most likely near term application of the enhanced mobility techs they're discovering for robots is to be remotely operated vehicles for actual soldiers. Having a Wii-like interface, or something more full body even, would work well at the goal of taking soldiers out of the line of fire and be operational long before robots can replace people in social situations. And war, whatever else it is, is also a social situation, albeit an incredibly nasty and degraded one.

That, of course, brings up other ethical considerations. Is a soldier or peacekeeper at no risk of death for anything s/he does a particular risk for committing battlefield atrocities or engaging in police brutality or would the constant monitoring be a restraint on that as it has been in making police interrogations more above board? Would it make war so disproportionate that large-scale occupations and hard power colonialism were feasible again?

Anyway, interesting question.

Posted by Natasha Chart on 01/06/2009 @ 11:48AM PT
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Rebekah - great question, who will control these robots if they ever get to the stage Pike talks about? Clearly there will be humans (probably military experts) behind the controls, but my question is - does killing people behind a robot change your calculation of who to kill? It becomes more like a video game, then. It definitely begs Natasha's questions - "Is a soldier or peacekeeper at no risk of death for anything s/he does a particular risk for committing battlefield atrocities or engaging in police brutality or would the constant monitoring be a restraint on that as it has been in making police interrogations more above board? Would it make war so disproportionate that large-scale occupations and hard power colonialism were feasible again?"

Stephanie - thanks for the insights from your experience, and for your comment that "only a human with an actual heart and feeling of compassion can STOP something as horrid as Genocide". I think of a Martin Luther King Jr quote: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Thanks to all for your thoughts - would love to hear more!

Posted by Martha Heinemann Bixby on 01/06/2009 @ 12:49PM PT
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this argument is the reason we have war in the first place; war does not end war, war creates war. The concept that having the US. act as a sort of world government is beyond insane. Simmilarly the concept of any world government ruling by militarism is a rediculous idea. There is more to peace then military strength

Posted by Skylar Salerno on 01/06/2009 @ 03:16PM PT
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Martha is the campaign manager at the Save Darfur Coalition. She has worked with a number of organizations and institutions advocating against genocide, including Team Darfur, STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition and Voices for Sudan. The views expressed here are her own.