In September 2017, the UK media and a great deal of the international technology and defence press, announced that the UK had laid out a new doctrine in regards to autonomous weaponry. The Guardian reported, on 10^th September, that Britain’s military will “commit to ensuring that drones and other remote weaponry are always under human control, as part of a new doctrine designed to calm concerns about the development of killer robots.”[1]

The UK’s announced position on autonomous weaponry was released as part of the August 2017 “Joint Doctrine Publication 0-30.2 – Unmanned Aircraft Systems.”[2] As well as catching the attention of the relatively mainstream press, the document unsurprisingly provoked renewed discussion of the role for autonomous robots in the military, and the feasibility of a potential, pre-emptive ban.

The press framed the Ministry of Defence’s new doctrine as an almost direct response to the August 2017…

A recent installment of The Inquiry asked “Can we teach robots ethics”? The discussion in the episode provides some really interesting food for thought. Anyway, it reminded me that, for a while, I’ve wanted to write about something that troubles me in discussions of AI, and particularly military AI uses: The idea that coding ethics is either possible or desirable.

This is a fairly quick stab at the topic, and is mainly framed around Arkin’s Governing Lethal Behaviour from 2008. It’s in no way intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the topic – or indeed, of Arkin’s work… But hopefully, this kind of criticism can generate useful further discussion.

This is Part One. Part Two to follow.

Robert Arkin’s “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture” (Arkin, 2008) is widely regarded as a keystone text in the field of ethics and autonomous military (non)lethal technology…

I’ve written on this subject before (at considerably more length) but I wanted to offer a couple of reflections on responsibility and the “ethical moment” in war…

I recently rewatched the rather brilliant (and long – oh, so very long) The Cruel Sea. In one of the films most iconic scenes, we witness Captain Lockhart racked with guilt having, he believes, caused the unnecessary deaths of a number of sailors. Finding Lockart in this state,  Ericson tells him:

“No one murdered them. It’s the war, the whole bloody war. We’ve got to do these things and say our prayers at the end.”

The scene is generally seen as depicting a typical mix of tragic stoicism and, perhaps unusually, a consciously anti-war sentiment.

There is something else though – a pathology of absolving of responsibility for violences done in wartime. This idea has been explored throughout the history…

I’ve spent my day off with this wonderful biography of J Robert Oppenheimer. This quotation, on cruelty and responsibility is particularly striking, I think…

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