News Story: Killer Robots? ‘Never,’ Defense Secretary Carter Says

Terminator (Image: Flickr User -  Insomnia Cured Here)

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. and COLIN CLARK

IN FLIGHT TO ANDREWS AFB: Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is pushing hard for artificial intelligence — but the US military will “never” unleash truly autonomous killing machines, he pledged today.

“In many cases, and certainly whenever it comes to the application of force, there will never be true autonomy, because there’ll be human beings (in the loop),” Carter told Sydney and fellow reporter John Harper as they flew home to Washington.

Carter’s trip to Austin and San Francisco had been all about outreach to the information technology community. In particular,, he said, “we’re making big investments” in autonomy, which is the centerpiece of Carter’s Third Offset Strategy to retain America’s high-tech edge. But, he emphasized, technology must operate within legal and ethical limits.

This is the issue that Vice Chairman of the Vice Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, calls the Terminator Conundrum. The prestigious Defense Science Board, which recently released its summer study on the issue of autonomy, called for immediate action on the development of autonomous capabilities at the same time that it stressed the need for building verifiable trust in such weapons.

DSB did not state whether weapons should be allowed to kill humans without a human in the loop. But the study authors say that, “when something goes wrong, as it will sooner or later, autonomous systems must allow other machine or human teammates to intervene, correct, or terminate actions in a timely and appropriate manner, ensuring directability. Finally, the machine must be auditable—in other words, be able to preserve and communicate an immutable, comprehensible record of the reasoning behind its decisions and actions after the fact.”

Read the full story at Breaking Defense