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On the moral responsibility of military robots

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Abstract

This article discusses mechanisms and principles for assignment of moral responsibility to intelligent robots, with special focus on military robots. We introduce the concept autonomous power as a new concept, and use it to identify the type of robots that call for moral considerations. It is furthermore argued that autonomous power, and in particular the ability to learn, is decisive for assignment of moral responsibility to robots. As technological development will lead to robots with increasing autonomous power, we should be prepared for a future when people blame robots for their actions. It is important to, already today, investigate the mechanisms that control human behavior in this respect. The results may be used when designing future military robots, to control unwanted tendencies to assign responsibility to the robots. Independent of the responsibility issue, the moral quality of robots’ behavior should be seen as one of many performance measures by which we evaluate robots. How to design ethics based control systems should be carefully investigated already now. From a consequentialist view, it would indeed be highly immoral to develop robots capable of performing acts involving life and death, without including some kind of moral framework.

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Notes

  1. Between 50 and 80 countries either already use or are in the process of acquiring the technology to start using military robots (ABIresearch 2011).

  2. For instance, a regular aircraft like a Boing 767 is not considered a highly lethal weapon, although it may be used to kill thousands of people. Likewise, a kilogram of water, with an equivalent mass-energy corresponding to one thousand Nagasaki bombs, has low lethality when used in the intended fashion.

  3. However, this can also be seen as an example of collective responsibility of the company’s employees and owners. See for instance (Young 2010, p. 67).

  4. Note that equating the internal decision process with the concept of intention, very much is an observers perspective, consistent with the previously adopted view of moral responsibility as a quality an observer assigns to an agent.

  5. Also see https://edocs.uis.edu/kmill2/www/TheRules/ (Accessed January 3, 2012).

  6. Basic forms of this type of reinforcement learning is already developed and used in robotics (see e.g. Hertzberg and Chatila (2008) or Sutton and Barto (1998)), with inspiration from the “Law of Effect”, a model of human and animal learning introduced by Thorndike (1911).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their highly valuable comments and suggestions to this and earlier versions of the paper.

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  1. Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Thomas Hellström

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Hellström, T. On the moral responsibility of military robots. Ethics Inf Technol 15, 99–107 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9301-2

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