Military Robots: A Robotic Analysis

For less than a few centuries ago, the battlefield was significantly different. Wars used to be fought on foot and swords were the weapon of choice until guns are invented. The usage of horse chariots has slowly evolved into tanks. As the technologies progressed, robots are invented to make our lives easier in carrying out specific task that were given to them. In the field of robotics regarding the military warfare during the present days, they have been a series of remote controlled automatons to undergo missions such as reconnaissance and assault missions. Robotic technologies have become more autonomous, meaning that it can be intelligent enough to almost think and act like humans. In the near future or even as of now, more robots that

Even so, there is always a person “in the loop” on the decision making process of an autonomous robot. An autonomous robot set out on its own in the complex battlefield and complex circumstances without any human intervention at all will raise some concerns. One of the concerns is the possibility of a malfunctions. In accordance to J.D R. (2015), there is a case of a malfunctioning autonomous military robot in Roscoe, Texas that kills 1,242 people during a live fire demonstration due to a hardware malfunction. There also concern about the risk of these autonomous military robots being hacked. As mentioned by Zhou J. (2015), robots are susceptible to being hacked as it would be a tactical advantage for the enemy to capture, gather information and make them turn against its allies rather than just destroying it. Other than that, another concern that is to implementing the decision making within a fully autonomous robot. Due to there is no infallible certainty to every possibility in every situation, there exists a problem that thousands lines of codes written in various programs within a fully autonomous robot will always have a chance to encounter an unexpected situation. This problem can be portrayed through Isaac Asimov’s laws revolves around his stories whereas a robot will encounter a series of unforeseen situations that it’s actions doesn’t not always comply all of his laws at once. As proposed by Lin P., Bekey G. & Abney K. (2008), there are efforts in making an autonomous robot to be functional on making decision through moral consideration by utilizing ethical frameworks such as utilitarianism consequentialism and deontology. According to Bowcott O. (2015), there is a campaign named Stop Killer Robots co-founded by the Human Rights Watch supports the ban of advancement and manufacture of fully autonomous weapons as it does not obey with the two vital principles the International