Ethics of Autonomous Drones in the Military

J ard May Professor Elfstrom February 25, 2013 Intro to morals A Soldier, Taking Orders From Its Ethical Judgment Center In this term the author Cornelia Dean has three major engineers that ar assumeed by arguments made by others. The first major important point is the encouraging idea that self-governing robots crapper perform more ethic entirelyy in combat slurs than any spend in the same scenario.She states that even the outdo and most trained soldiers that are in the midst of battle may not always be able to act accordingly with the vault of heaven of honor rules of engagement that were stated by the Geneva Convention because of potential trouncing out from normal human emotions much(prenominal) as anger, fear, resent, and vengefulness. The second major point Dean privations to show, by the views and studies of others, in her article is that with this realistic whole step in our evolution of military technology we do not want to let this idea fade away.An other major point is if we do extend this technology how would we do so, and if not, would we regret not advancing in this battleground further legion(predicate) years from now. With all of this reading Dean uses to feed her ideas there are still major flaws such as, the majority of these ideas and beliefs are theoretical, they still have not been fully tested, there is error in all technologies, and where else would the technical advancements lead artificial intelligence.The first argument providing support for Deans major point comes from the research dead reckoning and thoughts of a computer scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology named Ronald Arkin. Arkin is currently on a lower floor contract by the unite States Army to design softwarfaree programs for possible battle surface area and current battlefield robots. The research hypothesis of Arkin is that he believes that knowing autonomous robots heap perform some(prenominal) more ethically in the heat of the ba ttlefield than humans currently can.Yet this is just a hypothesis and while there is much research done towards this hypothesis there are still no absolutely positive research teaching that states an autonomous robot prevue can in fact perform better than any soldier on the ground or up in a plane could do. In Arkins hypothesis, he stated that these robots could be designed with no sense of self-preservation. This means that without one of the strongest fears for humans, the fear of death, these robots would be able to understand, compute, and react to situations with out outside irrelevant emotions.Although the men and women innovation these robot programs may be able to decline this psychological enigma of scenario fulfillment, which volition cause soldiers to retain information that is playing out easier with a bias to pre-existing ideas, it is not always the case that this happens to soldiers. You have to discharge that from the second a soldier begins his training he is trained and taught to root out the sense of self-preservation. There are isolated incidents with soldier error, but they are and will be corrected by superior officers or their confrere soldiers.Another factor that affects Cornelia Deans arguments is that there are errors in all things including technology. Throughout history there have been new uses of technology in warfare but with these come worrys and error flaws that have cause and can cause more casualties than needed. With the use of an Automated drone the belief by Dean is that it will be able to decide whether or not to launch an attack on a high precedence design whether or not if the target is in a public are and will decide if the civilian casualties would be worth it.But what happens if that drone is all identifying the target and the number of civilians surrounding it? It will not be able to factor in what type of people would be around him such as men, women, or children and any variance of them. The error in t his situation would be the drone governing the target is high enough priority and a missile is launched and the civilians were women and children around while a school carriage was driving by.The casualties would then instantly out weigh the priority to eliminate a specific target and a human pilot would much easier abort a mission than a predetermined response of an autonomous robot. Although Ronald Arkin believes there are situations that could arise when there may not be time for a robotic device to relay back what is happening to a human operator and wait for how to respond in the situation that could round a mission, it may be that second of time delay betwixt the robot and human operator that the ethical judgment is made.Also the realization that many robots in which are operated by humans are widely utilize to detect mines, dispose of or collects bombs, and clear out buildings to help visualise extra safety of our soldiers is a way that robots are already apply today a s battlefield assistants supports Dean. But all of these machines in the field have moments of failure or error. When the machines do fail it takes a soldier who has trained for that experience to fix and then use it again. If an autonomous drone fails while on a mission it is completely by its self and no human operator to fix it.Then can arise the problem of enemies realizing they were even being monitored and they could gain access to our military technology and can eventually use it against us. Another major point that Cornelia Dean discusses upon is with this possible step in our evolution of military technology we do not want to let this idea fade away. A large cut off of that is if we do develop this technology how would we do so, and if not, how much would we regret or how much would it affect us for not advancing in this field further many years from now.The argument that if other countries advance upon this fast and better than the United States military we could become less of a creation power and be more at risk of attack and war with greater human fatalities is not necessarily true. This situation is important in the sense of keeping up with the other world powers but I believe that the risk for reward is not worth the amount of change and civilian casualties that could happen from any number of robotic drones and their possible errors.There is a misadventure as the technology develops and robots become more and more aware to the point were, Arkin believes that, they can make decisions at a higher level of technological development. Yet if these autonomous robots truly can think for themselves and make decisions brings a whole new possibility of problems of what if the robot can decide something differently than what the developers originally had programmed. Also comes the actual use problem of can the judicature ethically accept that in early stages of use, even after extraneous testing, there may be accidental casualties.If a robot has an y error of making decisions because of how new and un-tested they are any of the possibly marvelous results would not be the responsibility of the robot but of the country and disposal that designed it. The supporting evidence of this article strongly shows that Cornelia Dean will hope that use of these ethically superior autonomous robots will be apart of our military in the near future before the United States fall behind to other super powers in the world.Yet with all of this information Dean uses to present her ideas there are still major flaws such as, the majority of these ideas and beliefs are theoretical, they still have not been fully tested, and that there is error in all technologies. With these major points being enforced with dope of evidence throughout the article, and with all of the possible negative sides and errors of this argument, it is safe to say that this will be and is a controversial topic of discussion by many governments and all parties involved with th is technological advancement.