Battlebots with a Conscience?

A new meme is quietly developing about the danger of ‘killer robots’.

So far, it’s still below the radar for the general public. The average person knows about the Terminator movies, et al, but is not yet aware that autonomous military robots with the ability to use lethal force are being deployed as we speak.

For now, the news and the meme are both largely confined to special interest blogs, like this one, this one, and our own.

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log has also picked up the thread, writing recently about “KILLER ROBOTS ... FRIEND OR FOE?”

Thousands of robots are already on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what happens when you hand the robot a gun and turn it loose?

Some researchers fear that giving military robots autonomy as well as ammo is the first step toward a “Terminator”-style nightmare, while others suggest that in some scenarios, weapon-wielding robots could someday act more humanely than humans.

Alan Boyle, the author of that blog, takes the question a step further by speculating about efforts toward the creation of “battlebots with a conscience.”

This work goes way beyond science-fiction author Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which supposedly ruled out scenarios where robots could harm humans. . .

Even without the Three Laws, there’s plenty in today’s debate over battlefield robotics to keep novelists and philosophers busy: Is it immoral to wage robotic war on humans? How many civilian casualties are acceptable when a robot is doing the fighting? If a killer robot goes haywire, who (or what) goes before the war-crimes tribunal?

With the news this week about the potential for building a brain-like molecular computer that could pack all the computing power of a human brain inside a two-inch sphere, the need for assessing how to deal with intelligent autonomous robots seems more acute than ever.