When robots kill: urgent questions over drone warfare!
WASHINGTON - April 30, 2011 - Warrior robots have always engendered fear and fascination. Now, as they are actually changing the face of war, experts are worrying about the ethics and fairness of using them.
Robotic sentries, equipped with machine guns, infrared sensors and pattern recognition software, patrol Israel’s border with Gaza and guard the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
Other robots have been used as snipers in Iraq, where they regularly destroyed human targets from as far as two kilometers away.
Unmanned Predator drones have hunted and killed terrorists and insurgents in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Now they are being used to unlawfully invade a sovereign nation and drive Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi from power.
Fantasy became reality with development of a robotic Counter Rocket Artillery Mortar system (known as C-RAM), which looks a bit like Star Wars’ R2D2. It shoots down incoming artillery, rocket and mortar rounds in mid-air, before they can hit their ground targets, and does so in a fraction of the time it takes humans just to realize they are being attacked.
A land-based version was deployed in Iraq in the summer of 2005 to protect Baghdad’s Green Zone.
“Robotics are about where computers were in 1980,” says Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
“It is not just an American expansion. It’s global. There are 43 countries working on military robotics right now. You have this just huge, immense growth.”
Military robots have rapidly evolved from remote-controlled systems, in which humans made all the decisions, to sophisticated new technologies equipped with layers of artificial intelligence that require little or no human attention.
