Keith Abney

I'm grateful for the below review by Manny, especially with the apt summary in the word "Machiavellian." I read this after discussing with an old friend who has gotten deep into CS/development the possibilities of a Terminator type development happening. My friend said that school instilled the viewpoint that this is comfortably far off; this report, too, keeps that up as a defense whenever possible horrible scenarios come of: those possibilities are far of in the future so we don't need to discuss them. In my view, as a millennial coming of age in a ruined world, this type of reasoning is extremely ignorant. Those who sow the seeds of these possibilities should be accountable for them, somehow, even if they happen after their death. The "it's not our problem because it'll be happen in far in the future" mindset has got to go, along with some other underlying assumptions upon which this report floats.

It was very curious how many times the fluidity of things like morality, ethics, and responsibility came up very clearly in one sentence only to be whisked away with lines suggesting that it's not to be worried about, because we're considered about our (the US military's) ethical models.

Having to leave the internet soon, I'll cut this review shorter than intended. If anyone wants my Mendeley-annotated version, send me a message, and I hope I can get a thorough blog review/critique of this reports and its very telling underlying military belief system up soon. The basic summary is this though: the military believes killbots are an inevitable development, and such a development will be fraught with many dangerous challenges, but the urge of the paper is to go ahead regardless because the US must, in their eyes, retain there hegemonic force of having the most terrifying weapons. And yes, it is mentioned that these robots are likely to enter in society.

Robotics ethics is a blooming, depressingly (to me) relevant field, and I wish to see more angles on it than the weaponized C3I style rhetoric of the military, but I'm glad I peered into this dark window to hopefully help shape the future away from this, as we all have a hand in, and I urge any roboticists/programmers to imagine farther into the future than they feel responsible for, and check their intentions and underlying metaphors for their beliefs and actions.… (meer)