{"id":202968,"date":"2022-01-17T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=202968"},"modified":"2022-01-10T09:09:09","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T09:09:09","slug":"lethal-autonomous-weapons-systems-and-the-fight-to-contain-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/01\/lethal-autonomous-weapons-systems-and-the-fight-to-contain-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Fight to Contain Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Keep Your Laws Off My Planet<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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World Politics Review<\/p><\/div>\n

9 Jan 2022 – <\/em>Here\u2019s a scenario to consider<\/a>: a military force has purchased a million cheap, disposable flying drones each the size of a deck of cards, each capable of carrying three grams of explosives \u2014 enough to kill a single person or, in a \u201cshaped charge<\/a>,\u201d pierce a steel wall. They\u2019ve been programmed to seek out and \u201cengage\u201d (kill) certain human beings, based on specific \u201csignature\u201d characteristics like carrying a weapon, say, or having a particular skin color. They fit in a single shipping container and can be deployed remotely. Once launched, they will fly and kill autonomously without any further human action.<\/p>\n

Science fiction? Not really. It could happen tomorrow. The technology already exists.<\/p>\n

In fact, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) have a long history. During the spring of 1972, I spent a few days occupying the physics building<\/a> at Columbia University in New York City. With a hundred other students, I slept on the floor, ate donated takeout food, and listened to Alan Ginsberg when he showed up to honor us with some of his extemporaneous poetry. I wrote leaflets then, commandeering a Xerox machine to print them out.<\/p>\n

And why, of all campus buildings, did we choose the one housing the Physics department? The answer: to convince five Columbia faculty physicists to sever their connections with the Pentagon\u2019s Jason Defense Advisory Group, a program offering money and lab space to support basic scientific research that might prove useful for U.S. war-making efforts. Our specific objection: to the involvement of Jason\u2019s scientists in designing parts of what was then known as the \u201cautomated battlefield\u201d for deployment in Vietnam. That system would indeed prove a forerunner of the lethal autonomous weapons systems that are poised to become a potentially significant part of this country\u2019s \u2014 and the world\u2019s \u2014 armory.<\/p>\n

Early (Semi-)Autonomous Weapons<\/strong><\/p>\n

Washington faced quite a few strategic problems in prosecuting its war in Indochina, including the general corruption and unpopularity of the South Vietnamese regime it was propping up. Its biggest military challenge, however, was probably North Vietnam\u2019s continual infiltration of personnel and supplies on what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran from north to south along the Cambodian and Laotian borders<\/a>. The Trail was, in fact, a network of easily repaired dirt roads and footpaths, streams and rivers, lying under a thick jungle canopy that made it almost impossible to detect movement from the air.<\/p>\n

The U.S. response, developed by Jason in 1966 and deployed the following year, was an attempt to interdict that infiltration by creating<\/a> an automated battlefield composed of four parts, analogous to a human body\u2019s eyes, nerves, brain, and limbs. The eyes were a broad variety of sensors \u2014 acoustic, seismic, even chemical (for sensing human urine) \u2014 most dropped by air into the jungle. The nerve equivalents transmitted signals to the \u201cbrain.\u201d However, since the sensors had a maximum transmission range of only about 20 miles, the U.S. military had to constantly fly aircraft above the foliage to catch any signal that might be tripped by passing North Vietnamese troops or transports. The planes would then relay the news to the brain. (Originally intended to be remote controlled, those aircraft performed so poorly that human pilots were usually necessary.)<\/p>\n

And that brain, a magnificent military installation secretly built in Thailand\u2019s Nakhon Phanom, housed two state-of-the-art IBM mainframe computers. A small army of programmers wrote and rewrote the code to keep them ticking, as they attempted to make sense of the stream of data transmitted by those planes. The target coordinates they came up with were then transmitted to attack aircraft, which were the limb equivalents. The group running that automated battlefield was designated Task Force Alpha and the whole project went under the code name Igloo White.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, Igloo White was largely an expensive failure<\/a>, costing about a billion dollars<\/a> a year for five years (almost $40 billion<\/a> total in today\u2019s dollars). The time lag between a sensor tripping and munitions dropping made the system ineffective. As a result, at times Task Force Alpha simply carpet-bombed areas where a single sensor might have gone off. The North Vietnamese quickly realized how those sensors worked and developed methods of fooling them, from playing truck-ignition recordings to planting buckets of urine.<\/p>\n

Given the history of semi-automated weapons systems like drones and \u201csmart bombs\u201d in the intervening years, you probably won\u2019t be surprised to learn that this first automated battlefield couldn\u2019t discriminate between soldiers and civilians. In this, they merely continued a trend that\u2019s existed since at least the eighteenth century in which wars routinely kill more civilians than combatants.<\/p>\n

None of these shortcomings kept Defense Department officials from regarding the automated battlefield with awe. Andrew Cockburn described<\/a> this worshipful posture in his book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins<\/em><\/a>, quoting Leonard Sullivan, a high-ranking Pentagon official who visited Vietnam in 1968: \u201cJust as it is almost impossible to be an agnostic in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, so it is difficult to keep from being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who or what, you well might wonder, was to be worshipped in such a temple?<\/p>\n

Most aspects of that Vietnam-era \u201cautomated\u201d battlefield actually required human intervention. Human beings were planting the sensors, programming the computers, piloting the airplanes, and releasing the bombs. In what sense, then, was that battlefield \u201cautomated\u201d? As a harbinger of what was to come, the system had eliminated human intervention at a single crucial point in the process: the decision to kill. On that automated battlefield, the computers decided where and when to drop the bombs.<\/p>\n

In 1969, Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland expressed his enthusiasm<\/a> for this removal of the messy human element from war-making. Addressing a luncheon for the Association of the U.S. Army, a lobbying group, he declared:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the battlefield of the future enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. With first round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition will be less important.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Westmoreland meant by \u201cfix the opposition\u201d was kill the enemy. Another military euphemism in the twenty-first century is \u201cengage.\u201d In either case, the meaning is the same: the role of lethal autonomous weapons systems is to automatically find and kill human beings, without human intervention.<\/p>\n

New LAWS for a New Age \u2014 Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every autumn, the British Broadcasting Corporation sponsors a series of four lectures given by an expert in some important field of study. In 2021, the BBC invited Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, to deliver those \u201cReith Lectures.\u201d His general subject was the future of artificial intelligence (AI), and the second lecture was entitled \u201cThe Future Role of AI in Warfare.\u201d In it, he addressed the issue of lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS, which the United Nations defines as \u201cweapons that locate, select, and engage human targets without human supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russell\u2019s main point, eloquently made<\/a>, was that, although many people believe lethal autonomous weapons are a potential future nightmare, residing in the realm of science fiction, \u201cThey are not. You can buy them today. They are advertised on the web.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen any of the movies in the Terminator<\/em> franchise, but apparently military planners and their PR flacks assume most people derive their understanding of such LAWS from this fictional dystopian world. Pentagon officials are frequently at pains to explain why the weapons they are developing are not, in fact, real-life equivalents of SkyNet \u2014 the worldwide communications network that, in those films, becomes self-conscious and decides to eliminate humankind. Not to worry, as a deputy secretary of defense told Russell, \u201cWe have listened carefully to these arguments and my experts have assured me that there is no risk of accidentally creating SkyNet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russell\u2019s point, however, was that a weapons system doesn\u2019t need self-awareness to act autonomously or to present a threat to innocent human beings. What it does need is:<\/p>\n