Killing Robots and Just War Theory
oleg.nu
oleg.nu
The linked post does not discuss Just War Theory at all. It discusses political positions of certain thought leaders as pertain to IHL. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except (a) if you're quoting Jonathan Parry more than Thomas Aquinas, what you're discussing isn't Just War Theory, even if it is desperately trying to claim that philosophical heritage; and (b) it isn't a "theory" at all because, within a secular framework, there is neither a set of foundational premises accepted universally as truth nor any testability. Just War Theory is only a "theory" within a Catholic epistemological framework. If your epistemological framework does not include a deity or the possibility of one day conversing with that deity, then it's meaningless to talk about your interpretation of their rules as being true or false.
(I suspect his larger point was that, if you try to come up with a definition which includes an industrial robot arm, a bomb disposal robot, and a robot vacuum cleaner, those things don't actually have much in common - so your definition will sweep up a bunch of things that most people wouldn't call robots)
The simplest example of a justified war is one of defense (like what Ukraine is engaging in). But under JWT, even though Russia is not justified in its actions, the individual soldiers are morally permitted to follow orders to kill combatants. Thankfully, at least, under JWT soldiers are not justified in following orders to kill noncombatants.
1. https://all-of-christ-for-all-of-life.castos.com/episodes/ju...
But there are plenty of other philosophies and ethical/logical paths one can take.
In particular the article doesn’t touch upon nonviolent resistance, which one can argue is more ethical than self defense. I also don’t agree that you can reduce war to a series of individuals protecting their right not to be killed and therefore war at scale is justified in a general sense. I do appreciate the mention of information asymmetry for conscription as a flaw in ethical standing by those who would wage war, but this is obvious since that’s how pretty much every war has ever been started.
Machines designed to kill people don’t have any ethical escape route. They are by definition evil constructs. The creation and use of an evil construct is not justified in any ethical argument.
In the past there were no means to minimize the needs of loyal humans, workers are humans, soldiers are humans etc, now automation reach a sufficient point to automate *some* aspects, on one side might be sold in moral, humanitarian, legal terms etc, in some aspects might also really be, but the real target is just the old classic race toward absolute power.
You may find of interest this essay on "The Mythology of Wealth" on economic mythologies used to justify social pyramids and with a small elite at the top: https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla....
See this online book by Marshall Brain on robots being used to concentrate wealth (see especially the chapter "Robotic Freedom" from which this text comes): https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation "The Concentration of Wealth: If you look at our economy as a whole, you can understand why robots have the potential to be so disruptive if we do not handle their arrival properly. ..."
And what is often ignored is that as automation -- especially computing -- makes it possible for one person to do more, even if a human is still needed in an economic loop somewhere, it weakens the financial bargaining position of many other humans (assuming demand does not rise as fast as capacity) who must trade their labor for kanban-token-like ration units (i.e. fiat dollars) in order to survive or maybe in some cases thrive.
So we don't need full automation for all this to be very disruptive economically. And we are already seeing some of this as people with less tech or other skills are falling by the wayside economically and their marriages and lives are disintegrating (or never happening in the first place) and they turn to drugs to relieve the pain and so on leading to "deaths of despair". That is something we may see greatly accelerate as driving is automated given how important economically driving jobs are to many people with just a high school education.
But even highly rewarded skills today can become rapidly obsolete through technology (like a radiologist reading x-rays or a broker trading stocks). And eventually programmers may see that happen to their livelihoods too.
Of course, revolutions often turn out to be different then expected, as usually it is the best organized who take power (like in Iran durign the 1970s, the students revolted bu it was the better-organized religious hardliners who ultimately prevailed). Related Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."
But when you have robots guards (e.g. in the movie "Elysium"), then who cares about human revolts?
Still, there is cause for optimism (also from Zinn): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertain... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability."
See Marshall Brain's novelette "Manna" as a fictionalization of wealth concentration and total surveillance from automation and an social alternative. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" for an inspiring vision of alternative. https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...
Or Theodore Sturgeons's 1956 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the two-sided coin of freedom/subservience and technology: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/...
Or this essay I put together around 2010 mentions lots of alternatives (both good and bad ones): https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Ultimately though this comes down to a need for a change of heart as implied by my sig (amplifying and expanding on what many others like Albert Einstein and Bucky Fuller have said): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
War automation is another game: war is a classic way cohort of humans act against other cohort to gain advantages, or just to survive, so war MUST be a human thing in the social sense, have war automated that means some parts of the society can ignore to a certain extent the war and so they might be more interesting in approving wars not just to survive but for mere advantage gain, witch is a very bad idea if we want evolve. If a war touch a whole society than the whole society think much before accepting war, is not they just can do like stadium fan inciting a team, sitting in comfy setups because war is just a show. In that case when things go bad no one can revolt, because automation makes those few who control and know it fully armed and the rest of the society powerless.
That's why for instance, as a pacifist, I do like the classic Swiss model: mandatory conscription 1 month per year for 18-28 years old with guerrilla training an weapons/ammo at home. That's the classic si vis pacem para bellum, or the perfect balance of power: a country organized like that is very protected against invasions but not much good at invading others, a small permanent army hold the big war gear and represent the State, while all Citizens are mostly armed and trained so if the State derail try to pushing from Democracy to dictatorship Citizens know very well and have all the means to ensure such a bad bloodbath for all party that no one want to try moving toward ad dictatorship. Giving weapons ONLY after proper training and evaluation ensure social safety. On contrary I fear society where very few control basic tech we need, especially if those few are private non public bodies. Just imaging what can happen in a modern city in case of a real unrest against an oppressive move:
- closing the city is normally easy, people inside in modern world have less and less private transport means and those are more and more connected and controllable by the OEM, not by the formal owner, so basically locking few roads suffice to lock down many many many humans;
- since water is pushed with few centralized networks typically coming from the outside of the city, so electricity etc is easy to disrupt any of those service;
- it's also easy to leave people starving since in a city all eat but essentially there is no food production, just a small transformation.
Essentially a prison. While in a Swiss like scenario, in a more spread country it's impossible to lock down peoples, they know how to revolt, they can do so, they have infra explicitly built for guerrilla (against exterior invaders, but that does not change much the game) and they are trained in their own territory.
Those are the main difference I see:
- automation is good as long as the society is in control, witch means for instance that research is public so anyone can know how to build any tool of use, there is no private oligarchy/monopoly on infra etc;
- automation is extremely dangerous if only few have&know it.
Witch can be summarized: if we are all almost on-par we are cooperative friend and casual litigates does not harm much the society, we there is a significant imbalance in power than we are doomed to end up really badly.
Here is one chapter from the novel (more are on that blog if you don't want to buy the book): https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-12-31/retrotopia-neg... "This is the twelfth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator attends the Lakeland Republic’s annual drone shoot, and finds out that not all technological innovations start out from the current state of the art..."
About the real world, ideally the society control the automation in a very simple manner: since the public (State) fund well public research most of the private sector just implement @the good/practical part of those public research, think about what happen in IT or pharma industry, Xerox research, AT&T research were formally private, but practically a public paid and public pushed research, GAFAM born out of it and after those big labs no more real evolution/revolution happen; similarly for pharma industry in USA there was (ok, still is but just for name) the NIH, others just produce drugs discovered and tested by them. In such model there is not much room to steer the society, the most advanced research born out of public bodies who work for public interests, private can't compete, they can obviously research for themselves, avoid building something they dislike etc but can't really steer.
That's is. In laws term suffice ensuring an effective private-public separation forbidding the sliding door's mechanism and paying well enough, giving research facilities and freedom enough to discourage the jump toward the private sector.
Once schools/uni are a public-almost-only show, research is mostly public the private sector is powerless. They can make good profits of course, but not against the public. If you observe the past in the end companies who have built and sold public research were very profitable and even with high taxation the sole who gain less than now were top management and private equity investors, all the others gains more and for good.
If you analyze the history most advancement born out of public research or free research (old patronages), private research have given something to the history but small things not high tech, yes, most advancement are born out of military needs, but still, public needs.
To arrive at this point we need culture, so we need a middle class wealthy enough to study and live to live and progress not just to amassing money like classic stereotypical parvenues. That's why wall street was always against the middle class and culture, they prefer Marxists other bourgeois for this very reason, in the end they know that even Marxism promise much but never give real power to the masses, witch is just another form of neoliberal capitalism, like the actual Chinese one, while a classic bourgeois society actually gives power to the masses, in a substantial Democracy because that's the sole form of organization that ensure to most people the best social protection and they can't just select by census much.
A shorter version: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
And much more recently, from 2015, an email to Richard Stallman suggesting a campaign about a a pledge for foundations and non-profits to only fund and create free works. https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-to-only-fund-and-create-free-w...
I guess we'd all agree if your neighbor is driving armor over the border, you're being attacked.
But can you attack them before they get the border? Surely yes, why would you wait until they have the greatest advantage?
What about when the order is given? Surely yes, why wait two weeks for them to organize themselves? Hit them while they're getting ready to kill you.
What about while they're deciding? Of course, thinking about attacking is threatening too. Get them while they're deciding, that way you minimize the amount of harm you have to cause to them.
What about if they're simply driving their armor around, building up just in case you attack them? That seems fair, doesn't it? But why should you let them threaten you into giving any concessions?
It just never really seems like it ends. There's always some wrinkle where you can say "but he started it" and it's not actually all that clear.
By the same logic, I don't see how you can really say your war is just, just because you follow certain rules. "We won't kill any civilians" seems fair, but like it says in the article, there are no civilians. They're either driving a tank, or they built the tank, or they clean the tank, or they bought the tank, or they trained the driver, or they say nice things to the tank driver.
Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. I mean sure, if you can roll into their capital and everybody thinks it's great, we won't have to pour agent orange all over. But if it's not going our way, we will lower our standards. First by saying things that aren't nice, then by doing things that aren't nice. This is why international conflicts are not simply decided by a tug-of-war or a game of football. We can't accept the result thus far, so we will do something not nice, anything between sending diplomats home to ICBMs, until we get our way. The fact is there are no rules, we only say there were rules and that the loser broke them. If we'd lost, they'd say we did something wrong.
/rant
If we suppose the usual bits and bobs about how states work, then just war is important for two reasons. We should expect a states' population (and army) to not support their country in waging unjust wars, and we should expect other state's to not support other states that are waging unjust wars.
From that perspective, the difficult of delineating just wars just kind of becomes irrelevant. Functionally, the people must decide if they support a war or not, and other states must decide if they support a war or not.
Just war theory provides two things:
* An attempt to wrangle predictability out of chaos
* An attempt to pre-emptively inject some sort of "normal" ethics and morality into the framework.
A state can claim a just war all they want. But the more the claim hinges on pushing on the edges, the less likely the people (their army) and other nations will support that claim. And because as you say "there are no rules", your claims of justice will just ring hollow, and consequences (which may or may not be just) will follow.
Not saying you are wrong or right, just wanted to point out that's not what happens in real life, or it has not happened for the last 100 or so years. The most famous example are the Germans and WW2, for better or for worse the war was popular among the German population until 1943 (maybe late-1942). That was definitely not a just war. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine is obviously seen in a good light by the majority of the Russian population. And, less dramatic for the West, but the Iraq war (also an unjust war) had a ~70% approval rate among the US public in May 2003. Wars tend to become unpopular only when defeat gets closer.
There's also the famous exception (that kind of confirms the rule) of the Vietnam War, which probably did not have the support of the majority of the US population. I say "probably" because I haven't read that much about that war, nor was I alive back then, so maybe the famous "silent majority" that Nixon was talking about was also in support of the war, I wouldn't know.
We decide we need to invade someplace, then we massage the message to say it was just.
That doesn't mean anything at all is possible of course, there's a debating window offered by cultural history as to what we might be able to use as an excuse.
If they happen only after things are desperate enough, it is already improvement. Some countries seem to do them routinely, whether things are desperate or not.
So I will put a copy of what I posted there here on HN, since it is relevant to the bigger picture of killer robots:
I've thought about how to mitigate the risks of (potentially self-replicating) autonomous military robots and other potential WMDs since the 1980s when I was a visitor at the CMU Robotics labs of Hans Moravec and Red Whittaker, and also from taking classes with Frank von Hippel, Steve Slaby, George Miller, Gerry O'Neill, and Jim Beniger at Princeton, and from hanging out a few times with Freeman Dyson at the IAS and also talking with Ted Taylor (who Freeman Dyson put me in touch with) -- as well as talking to many other people and reading widely on this and related issues (both non-fiction and also insightful fiction, like James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear). My thoughts on this are summarized in an essay I wrote in 2010 on my website "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism".
Essentially, political controls will likely ultimately fail in the long-term given that parties to the (unlikely-in-any-case) political agreements have big incentives to cheat as long as they view the world in zero-sum competitive terms. As Freeman Dyson has explained in his book "Weapons and Hope", as long as the capacity to build WMDs remains they will always be a potential issue regardless of what treaties exist. The capacity to build such things eventually will always exist in an advanced technosphere. Right now it is relatively easy to build bioweapons and drones, and much harder to build nukes (which potentially might get easier with new advances in physics and material science). Frankly, we are doomed if we depend on political treaties alone to deal with this. What might succeed is ultimately a change of heart to A Newer Way of Thinking (like Albert Einstein and others like Donald Pet have talked about). Such a change of heart will involve emphasizing mutual security, intrinsic security, and achieving abundance from all through wise use of advanced technology. It will be a cultural change that makes the biggest difference, where in the long-term various political agreements might at most just reflect a global change of heart and perspective.
On a practical basis, tools that reflect a newer way of collaborative thinking like Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Jeff Conklin) and Convergent Facilitation (Miki Kashtan) may help groups a lot in thinking of better solutions that address the needs of everyone. Better Free and Open Source Intelligence tools widely deployed may also help everyone make better decisions and avoid disasters like Ukraine.
==== More Details
To that end of a change of heart and perspective towards a newer way of thinking, here are the main points from that essay:
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") ... and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...
--Paul Fernhout "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."