The trend in modern warfare, which typically means the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, is attack your enemies by remote, work with the friendlies up close. Air power, rocketry, and artillery have long been weapons of remote attack; now the arsenal includes drones – flying robotics that do everything except make the decision to attack – and now maybe that too.

I was reminded of this by an article in The Economist Droning on: How to build ethical understanding into pilotless warplanes.

The notion explained in the article is to give drones the ability to analyze not only the tactical situation, but also the ethical. Ethical?

Ethical as in – The Laws of War and Rules of Engagement – these are the codes by which modern warfare is supposed to be conducted. If a robot-drone, that is, its computer programming can be made to analyze a situation according to the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement; it can be said to have ‘an ethical governor for constraining lethal action in an autonomous system.’ This happens to be the title of a 2009 paper by Ronald C. Arkin (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and team GVU Technical Report. (The work behind the Economist article.)

Note the phrase ‘constraining lethal action.’ That means the drone’s analysis will contribute in some meaningful way to the decision of using lethal force, or not. The assumption is that a drone, flying over a target, can ‘see’ more clearly the objects in the target area, assemble information from a variety of sources (including ground observations), and combine this with a built in set of operational rules to determine if the target is appropriate. All in ‘real time,’ as computer techies would say, meaning most of this happens on the spot and in seconds.

Unfortunately, the background to this is the issue of ‘collateral damage’ – the killing of bystanders and other innocent people. Repeatedly, attacks using drones have also killed civilians, sometimes egregiously, meaning there was no valid military target present. That’s a critical point. When the drone uses lethal force on a building or vehicle, if it is a civilian asset, then it must be shown that it was ‘commandeered’ or taken over by people who are valid targets (i.e. terrorists, enemy army, etc.). This kind of ‘in the field’ distinction has profound legal and moral implications – war crimes. It would be helpful if the drones could distinguish friend, foe, and civilian. It would be even more helpful if the drone could evaluate probabilities of violation (or compliance) with the Laws of War or the Rules of Engagement. According to Dr. Arkin’s work, this is possible. He proposes giving the drone (through its software) an “Ethical Architecture.”

This would be a very complex rule-based system. (A rule-based system is an old field in artificial intelligence programming.)

An interesting set of conditions are involved:

- The drone’s optics must be good enough to distinguish major characteristics of human figures in its view, as in clothing, colors, body position.
- The database of known assets (which already exists) must be accurate on the ownership for each building in the area of the drone’s interest.
- Any ground observation fed to the drone needs to be accurate, particularly when it comes to the presence of civilians.
- The communications with the drone must be reliable and efficient in real-time, even when a drone’s controller may be thousands of miles away.
- The ability of the drone’s programming to accurately evaluate the situation must be quite good.
- The programming of the rules (the algorithms that evaluate what rule goes with what situation) needs to be quite good, nearly perfect.
- The links of command and control (between the drone, its control personnel, and officer in charge) must be effective in real-time.

None of these conditions are impossible, even for current technology. In fact, some of them are met on a routine basis. However, most of them have points of weakness, which in the fog of war tend to become points of breakdown. Mistakes mean loss of civilian life.

Most everything a combat mission robotic encounters will involve this sort of problem. We already have drones. Ground based robotic weapons are undergoing trials. Most of them have addressed some of the ethical control issues; but nothing like Dr. Arkin’s ‘ethical architecture’ is currently in use.

The ethical robot is an old topic, going back even farther than Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics. The military use of robots, which by the way is not limited to the United States military, puts the issues in high relief. Since it is well known that human soldiers make mistakes against the Laws of War and the Rules of Engagement, what are the standards for robots? While theoretically the robot’s ability to analyze and assess a situation is faster and more comprehensive (and not clouded by emotion), the elements that go into that process are inherently unreliable. We do not have artificial intelligence, yet. At a fundamental level, a robot will have large areas of incompetence added to any flaws in its working environment (like a bad communications connection).

Nevertheless, war conducted remotely by robotic machines is the trend. Theoretically, between air power, rockets, artillery, and robotics – a military action (the actual fighting) could be conducted entirely soldiers at a distance. This has been a topic of discussion for a long time. Meanwhile, the technology becomes more sophisticated. Even Dr. Arkin’s ethical architecture is a possible piece of programming. The pressure to use more robotics (as long as the budget allows) and the pressure to keep robotics under control is not going anywhere but up.