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AI & SOCIETY
Erschienen in: AI & SOCIETY 4/2013

01.12.2013 | 25TH ANNIVERSARY VOLUME A FAUSTIAN EXCHANGE: WHAT IS IT TO BE HUMAN IN THE ERA OF UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY?

Automatic decision-making and reliability in robotic systems: some implications in the case of robot weapons

verfasst von: Roberto Cordeschi

Erschienen in: AI & SOCIETY | Ausgabe 4/2013

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Abstract

In this article, I shall examine some of the issues and questions involved in the technology of autonomous robots, a technology that has developed greatly and is advancing rapidly. I shall do so with reference to a particularly critical field: autonomous military robotic systems. In recent times, various issues concerning the ethical implications of these systems have been the object of increasing attention from roboticists, philosophers and legal experts. The purpose of this paper is not to deal with these issues, but to show how the autonomy of those robotic systems, by which I mean the full automation of their decision processes, raises difficulties and also paradoxes that are not easy to solve. This is especially so when considering the autonomy of those robotic systems in their decision processes alongside their reliability. Finally, I would like to show how difficult it is to respond to these difficulties and paradoxes by calling into play a strong formulation of the precautionary principle.
Vorheriger Artikel “Does not compute”? Music as real-time communicative interaction
Nächster Artikel Naturalizing language: human appraisal and (quasi) technology

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Fußnoten
1
Robot’s decision or choice processes are usually considered the main hallmark of its “intelligence”—a term that refers to the ability of a machine to emulate cognitive abilities such as decision-making and learning, in the tradition of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this article, I shall intend automatism and autonomy as strictly related terms, in accordance with some use of these terms (see in the following). In contrast with this, robotic automatic systems are seen sometimes as carrying out only fixed or preset operations (e.g. industrial robots, which are not “intelligent” in the aforementioned sense), and as such, they are opposed to robotic autonomous systems, endowed with the above-mentioned cognitive abilities.
 
2
See Ashby (1950) and Walter (1953).
 
3
An excellent review is given by Lichocki et al. (2011). The issue of “roboethics” was raised at the 2004 First International Symposium on Roboethics in Sanremo, Italy (see Veruggio and Operto 2008).
 
4
Mindell (2002) documents the development of feedback-based control systems before cybernetics, also for military purposes, beginning from the 1920s. Wiener and Bigelow’s work between 1940 and 1942 introduced an approach that would radically change automatic-control theory into the design of predictors, so allowing for the introduction of frequency analysis which today is known as classic control theory.
 
5
The dispute between Rosenblueth and Wiener on the one side, and Taylor on the other, presents many interesting points which I pointed out elsewhere (Cordeschi 2002, chap. 4). See also Galison (1994).
 
6
On this and other aspects see e.g. Galison (1994) and Conway and Siegelman (2005).
 
7
AI’s first successes in those years were in the field of heuristic programming (see Cordeschi 2006). Samuel intervened to comment on Wiener’s claim, stating that the risks he referred to did not exist: a machine (actually, a computer program), Samuel objected, only limits itself to carrying out the “intentions” of its programmer (on this point, and the implication of machine learning, see Cordeschi and Tamburrini 2005, and above all Santoro et al. 2007; Tamburrini 2009).
 
8
This is a situation where a human decision-maker predicts a particular scenario which he considers plausible, e.g. because he has experienced it in a simulation during military training: in this situation he ends up ignoring or undervaluing cues that seem to contradict him. Both the war games mentioned by Wiener and the case of Vincennes can fall within this box. Gray deals with the characteristics of these “synthetic environments” of the early 1990s. It thus seems that today’s dissent is the same as back then: for some the conclusion must be that “the human is the limiting factor”, whilst for others simulations do not take human factors into account and are a “complete and utter triumph of chilling analytic, cybernetic rationality over chaotic, real life human desperation. […] Virtual reality as a new way of knowledge [is] a new and terrible kind of transcendent military power” (see Gray 1997: 62).
 
9
See Lichocki et al. (2011) on the different claims on the ethical and legal aspects of this issue, which I am not dealing with here, and also on the thesis of robots as “moral agents” (at a given “level of abstraction”: see Floridi and Sanders 2004).
 
10
This testing was begun by IBM in 2001 (see http://​www.​research.​ibm.​com/​autonomic/​) and later by DARPA: see Canning (2005).
 
11
Some of these claims are in the document of the Human Rights Watch Society from November 2012: see http://​www.​hrw.​org/​print/​reports/​2012/​11/​19/​losing-humanity.
 
12
According to Sunstein, the “availability heuristics” is at the core of the precautionary principle, to the extent that such a heuristics suggests considering only certain risk factors, for example, the more recent or the more impressive ones. A consequence may be that “sometimes a certain risk, said to call for precautions, is cognitively available, whereas other risks, including those associated with regulation itself, are not” (Sunstein 2005: 37).
 
13
Notice that here I am referring to decision-making in “ill-defined problems” and real-life problems, not in the early AI “well-defined problems” mentioned by Krishnan (2009: 40).
 
14
This process should not be confused with the experimentation and production of robotic weapons when it is recognised how they are simply badly designed or malfunctioning. One example comes from SWORDS robots, the production of which was initially stopped because of their malfunctioning (Krishnan 2009: 113).
 
15
See Weiss (2003) for an insightful discussion on this point.
 
16
See Caelli et al. (2011): forms of DoS have always been used in conventional warfare, for example, when trying to prevent the enemy from accessing food sources, transport facilities or telecommunication networks.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Automatic decision-making and reliability in robotic systems: some implications in the case of robot weapons
verfasst von
Roberto Cordeschi
Publikationsdatum
01.12.2013
Verlag
Springer London
Erschienen in
AI & SOCIETY / Ausgabe 4/2013
Print ISSN: 0951-5666
Elektronische ISSN: 1435-5655
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-013-0500-0

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