World War III - There Will Be No Blood!

It is quite possible that the biggest nations of the world, the United States, Russia and China might engage themselves in a hostile war in the near future. The war will be fought ferociously on air, water and land with the most advanced weapons ever developed. The scale could be epic – we might even call it the Third World War. Everything will be at stake. Except humans. The soldiers will most likely be killer robots programmed to destroy the enemy’s resources until they surrender. There will be destruction, there will be catastrophe, and there will be victory and defeat. But there will be no blood! Human casualties could be little to nothing. Yet it will bring the losing nation to its knees.

So, here’s the question of the future – Are autonomous weapons (weapons not controlled by humans but rather artificial intelligence systems) a good thing?

What if nations agree upon a new code of military engagement that no humans would be targeted? Let’s assume that nations and their deployment of killer robots or autonomous weapons follow this code of military engagement in the same way that they have not used nuclear weapons since the middle of the last century. In that case, would it not be safe to say that human casualties from war would be significantly reduced? One opposing view is that we may not be able to restrain ourselves during military conflict and might act beyond the rules of engagement causing widespread casualties when autonomous weapons are allowed to target humans. Another opposing view is that the threshold for engaging in war would be greatly reduced if the human cost of war is apparently reduced, causing a Third World War to be fought sooner in the future.  

On the other hand, a supporting view is that artificial intelligence will also be used in military strategy that will tend to deter nations from war. Just like how the computer Watson could analyze the next possible moves of its opponent in Chess and beat the best players on Earth, AI would help nations predict the outcome of war even before engaging in war. The battle of the future could be won or lost even before fighting it. In other words, there would be no war but just plain surrender.

The debate is getting stronger as artificial intelligence takes shape in laboratories around the world. A limited amount of artificial intelligence is already being used by covert governmental agencies like CIA and MI5. And their capabilities are exponentially rising. The question is no longer about ‘if’ but about ‘when’. Killer robots or the cyborgs as seen in blockbuster movies of the past could become real in the near future. We might be divided upon whether this could help us or hurt us. But the community at large is already reacting to it.

On July 27^th 2015, an open letter was presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for a “ban on offensive autonomous weapons.” More than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers have signed it. I’ll end this article with the letter in full:

Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensiveautonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.