Robots Go to War

Money and Ethics

General Dynamics Robotics Systems president Scott Myers walks briskly through what appears to be Santa's workshop for robotics geeks. Here in the cavernous GDRS facility near Baltimore, technicians are assembling a fleet of experimental UGVs. Myers paternally pats the head-well, the sensor pod-of a warehouse patrol 'droid, but he lingers the longest around the Tactical Autonomous
Combat-Chassis, a jeep-like 'bot that's the hot rod of the UGV world.

Equipped with a 150-horsepower Volkswagen turbo-diesel engine and a suspension inspired by off-road racing vehicles, the TAC-C can scoot cross-country at speeds up to 80 mph. But what makes it really special is the state-of-the-art perception suite-ladar as well as stereo, color and infrared cameras, all working together to take an 400,000-pixel snapshot of the world 30 times a second."We can do 60 percent of what human [scouts] can do now, and will be able to do 90 percent by 2010," Myers says."These vehicles are going to be a lot cheaper than you think, and they're going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than replacing a human."

Military UGVs make so much sense for so many missions that they seem to be a no-brainer."I'll take one of these things any day," says Sergeant First Class Ralph Brewer, who served in a tank in Iraq, during a break in testing a UGV.
"I can't believe we don't have them already." But everybody in the Army isn't as enthusiastic as Brewer. With its tradition of, well, tradition, the military doesn't often rush to embrace newfangled ideas, especially ones that will profoundly change the way it operates. Also, Congress is wary of devoting money to a technology that hasn't yet produced many tangible results. Ultimately, of course, a weapons system is a political issue as much as it is a military one."It's not a question of technology," Myers says."It's a question of money."

And ethics. There are no plans to develop fully-autonomous robot tanks that can fire lethal weapons without any human input. So in the near term, at least, the creepy specter of hunter-killer cyborgs recycled from The Terminator remains a dystopian science-fiction clich. But the technology that allows UGVs to make life-or-death decisions on their own is coming. The concern is whether we have the political will to allow our machines to do our killing for us."It isn't going to happen without scrutiny," says Peter Danielson, director of the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia."But the impulse to get people out of the line of fire-to protect your troops-puts pressure on you to move farther and farther away from the enemy."

Despite all the lip service paid to keeping a human in the loop, Global-Security.org's Pike is convinced that autonomous lethal robots make so much sense that they're inevitable."They're going to sneak up on us, just like UAVs did," he says."They're going to do more and more of the toting. They're going to more and more of the surveilling. And when they start fighting, no organized force could stand against them."