Engineers work on moral compass for battlefield robots

Increasingly, robots are playing larger and larger roles on the modern battlefields of the more technologically developed countries. The U.S. occupation of Iraq especially has taken the use of automated drones, and remote-controlled battle robots to unprecedented new heights. Inexpensive and portable computing power has enabled the integration of autonomous circuitry into the wars of today, and certainly, this trend will continue inexorably.  (The U.S military aims to make a full 1/3rd of all aircraft autonomous by the end of next year, and by 2015, would like 1/3rd of all ground combat vehicles to be unmanned.)

The problem with robots on the battlefield is that they have limited capacity for judgment, and what may appear obvious to a human is unknowable to a machine. Recognizing friends, or foe is difficult. And programming a robot with any sort of rules of war is especially difficult as we humans haven't even really figured out what these rules are.

The U.S Army commissioned a robotics engineer working out of the Georgia Institute of Technology to create software that will emulate ethics, in military engagements. The aim of the software is to give a robot a sort of 'guilt program' that will help it measure the pro's and con's in the generation of civilian causalities. Basically, the software will balance the battle advantage of taking out a military target with the collateral damage of killing civilians. 

"We have thresholds established for [equivalents] of guilt that cause the robot to eventually refuse to use certain classes of weapons systems (or refuse to use weapons entirely) if it gets to a point where the predictions it's making are unacceptable by its own standards," said the robotics engineer, Ronald Arkin, when talking to CNET.

Ronald Arkin went on to say that he doesn't "believe unmanned systems will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced (at this point in time) that they can potentially perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of," because programmed robots will have a moral inflexibility when following predetermined battlefield rules of engagement, that humans often do not have.