On the Development of Robots for the Military

                Leading the world in military spending and development, the decisions of America will have a huge bearing on the wars of tomorrow. While the further development of remote systems is a certainty, it’s important to look into the benefits and flaws of these systems both from how the weapon works and how the operator works in order to better plan our study and understanding of what needs to be done to minimize the risks.

                Historically the use of robots in the military has primarily been beneficial to the preservation of lives, with purposes such as scouting out landmines that represent a risk both to soldiers and civilians, defending against missiles and performing reconnaissance in hazardous scenarios. But recent years have seen an upswing in the development and use of robots as remote controlled weapons.

Currently these systems rely on a humans input before they shoot which has a mixture of benefits and risks. One of the greatest benefits, asides from the lack of necessity to risk a soldier’s life, is the reduction in stress a remote soldier goes through while deciding on a course of action. Under life or death scenarios, stress can easily lead to an increase in mistakes that cause injury or death to civilians or place their comrades at risk. A con to remote warfare is that indirect killing doesn’t register or process the same way that directly killing someone does in our brain (Psychologist Kevin Dutton) which could lead to making it “easier” for soldier’s to decide to kill when alternatives are available. While under some circumstances being able to make a “necessary” kill without as much moral dilemma and delay could be beneficial, without further study into this key decision making difference, we further doubts on the entire process

One large concern regarding this development is the possibility of completely autonomous robots. While many missile defense systems are autonomous the risks of a robot designed to shoot people being ran autonomously is a major global concern. Many current military robots with automatic targeting systems could easily be changed from human operated to automatic. The military benefits of this are miniscule and the difficulty of and AI program capable of telling friends from foes with even moderate accuracy and speed means that the likely hood of automatic anti-personal robots being used any time soon by the military should be low.