The 'Killer Robot' Olympics

DARPA Robotics Challenge. [Link]

Valkyrie and her fellow competitors—Chimp, RoboSimian, Hubo, Schaft and Thor—are at the center of a debate beset by distortions and spin on every side. Their developers want to portray them as benign; their detractors want to ban “killer robots.” But what’s certainly true is that we’re at “the beginning of a historic transformation in robotics,” as DARPA puts it. And the inescapable reality is that some machines will save lives and some will take lives, and they’ll be programmed to make the relatively simple but critical decisions on their own that determine who survives and who dies.

Many of these “robots” will take the form of airborne drones, big and small; some will be weapons systems on ships; and some, like Valkyrie and the other competitors scrambling over the obstacle course at Homestead-Miami Speedway, will be moving more or less like animals and humans.

The implications are enormous as all this comes amid widespread and growing excitement about robotics in daily life. Jeff Bezos just floated the imaginative notion that Amazon.com will be using drones to deliver packages in the not-too-distant future. The Google empire, always the spotter and setter of trends, is busy meanwhile buying up some of the best robotic labs in the business. But there’s no doubt the sinister Schwarzeneggan shadow of The Terminator haunts much of the discussion of military automatons.

A year ago, Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard published a report with the arresting title “Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots,” that I found perfectly convincing when I first read it. “Fully autonomous weapons,” it concluded, would be unable to meet international legal standards under the Geneva Conventions and, in action, they would have no compassion to temper their lethal judgments.