GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Banning killer robots

domingo, 26 de agosto de 2018

Banning killer robots

Banning killer robots

by Xavier Symons | 25 Aug 2018 |

A recent article in The Conversation by Harvard University law lecturer Bonnie Docherty argues that we should ban fully autonomous weapons (“killer robots”) as they are incapable of respect for human dignity.

Docherty, who has co-authored a report into the topic for Human Rights Watch, argues that killer robots risk fundamentally undermining the rules of war and effectively dehumanising armed conflict. According to Docherty, Robots by their very nature are unable to show compassion for other human beings, yet this is “an emotion that inspires people to minimise suffering and death”.

Killer robots are also incapable of recognising other human beings as human beings:

“these weapons could not truly understand the value of an individual life or the significance of its loss. Their algorithms would translate human lives into numerical values. By making lethal decisions based on such algorithms, they would reduce their human targets – whether civilians or soldiers – to objects, undermining their human dignity”.

As such, Docherty argues in favour of United Nations ban on fully autonomous weapons. Representatives from more than 70 nations will gather at the UN in Geneva later this month for a Convention on Conventional Weapons, and it is hoped that the delegates will agree to negotiating a ban.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

The Norwegian bioethicist Ole Martin Moen has published an unusual but intriguing article in the journal Bioethics. He analyses the arguments in the half-mad manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. For those whose memories don’t stretch back that far, Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematician who became obsessed with the decay of American society. He retired to a backwoods cabin and worked as a serial postal bomber whose handiwork killed three people and maimed 23 between 1978 and 1995. The New York Times published his 35,000-word manifesto in 1995 which eventually led to his capture.

Moen says that Kaczynski’s concerns should be taken seriously and refuted philosophically, even if he is a terrorist. “Although philosophers can only play a modest role in fighting terrorism, it is striking that, today, the most obvious line of response to one’s adversaries—to listen carefully, to show that one has understood their position, and to explain why one believes they are mistaken—is hardly even attempted as a means to discourage terrorists.”

His words can usefully be applied to many other areas of public discourse today, not just dialogues with ideologically-motivated terrorists. It’s very seldom that opposing sides listen carefully to each other. In the Middle Ages, academic battles took the form of “disputation and debate”. Stating the other side’s argument in the strongest possible form was an essential part of the process – before demolishing it, of course. We need a bit more of this fairness, even for madmen like Kaczynski.