Mar 24, 2016 ... An eye in the sky from the movie of the same name – the reality of drone ... A miniature surveillance drone the size of an insect. ... Killer robots.
Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader at Data61, Data61
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Eye in the Sky is a tight British thriller staring Helen Mirren, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and the late and already missed Alan Rickman. That should be enough to know to get you down to the cinema to see this recently released movie.
The movie is a surprisingly cerebral look at the future of war. The
enemy are Islamic terrorists hiding in plain sight in East Africa. The
“eye in the sky” of the title is a Predator drone loitering at 25,000ft
ready to rain death down onto the population below with its aptly named
Hellfire missiles.
The director Gavid Hood (Tsotsi, Wolverine) doesn’t take sides. Other than the obligatory pot shots at some gung ho Yanks and ineffectual Brits.
The movie features some amazing but very real technology coming to
the battlefield soon. A miniature surveillance drone the size of an
insect. Surveillance software that recognises ear prints. And another
drone that looks and flies like a humming bird.
But it doesn’t hold back on the moral and ethical dilemmas of future
warfare. Indeed, very slight spoiler alert, the whole movie can be seen
as an extended debate on a famous problem in ethics, the Trolley Problem. Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) in a scene from Eye in the Sky.Entertainment One
Ethical dilemmas
There are a number of different formulations of the Trolley Problem.
In fact, how people perceive the ethics of the Trolley Problem depend on
how it is formulated.
The basic setup is a runaway trolley careering down a track. There
are five people tied to the track. They are sure to die unless you throw
a lever and direct the trolley onto a siding. But here’s the ethical
kicker, this will kill one person tied to the track in the siding. What
do you do?
One variant removes the siding and replaces it with a fat man,
standing next to you on a bridge over the track. You can push the fat
man off the bridge and thereby stop the trolley. Do you push him off or
not?
The movie plays with this problem, changing the setting several times, and testing our response to these changes.
Behind this are some even more topical ethical problems.
Killer robots
Earlier this week, the the UK’s Royal Navy announced it will run the first robot war games in October this year.
It is clear from news stories like this that the military in the UK,
US, China and elsewhere are rushing to take advantage of what has been
called the third revolution in warfare – lethal autonomous weapons – or as the media often call them, killer robots.
In the movie Eye in the Sky, the actors struggle to make ethical
decisions with technology that is increasingly autonomous. Taking a line
out of the movie, the decision making does not reduce itself to simply
adding up numbers. There are many, often conflicting dimensions:
ethical, legal, military, and political.
Humans in the loop
Ultimately, in the movie, a human “in the loop” still has to make the final life or death decision. Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) in a scene from Eye in the SkyEntertainment One
But what happens when, as is likely in the near future, there is no
human any more in the loop? It is very likely that robots will be making
simplistic and erroneous decisions.
It was for these sort of reasons that I, and thousands of my colleagues working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics, signed an open letter calling for offensive autonomous weapons to be banned.
And it is for these sort of reasons that I will be going to the UN in Geneva next month to talk to diplomats at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons to persuade them to push forwards with their discussions on a ban.
There is only a small window of opportunity to get a ban in place
before this moves from the big screen and comes to the conflict zones of
our world.
As demonstrated by the Drone Papers,
secret documents that it’s claimed offer an “unprecedented glimpse
into Obama’s drone wars”, the technology will deceive us into thinking
we can fight clean, clinical wars. But in reality, nine out of ten
people being killed will not be the intended targets.
Just as in this movie, there will lots of collateral damage, women,
children and other people who just happen to be in the wrong place.
As with other technologies that have been successfully banned, like
blinding lasers and anti-personnel mines, we get to choose if killer
robots are part of our future of not.
Let’s make the right choice.
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