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Are Remotely Controlled Drones the First Step Towards Killer Robots?

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Daniel Saurez is a writer of high-tech thrillers. His latest novel, Kill Decision, deals with the creation of automated drones tasked to find, identify, and kill enemies without human intervene. In a recent TED Talk he discusses how the world is drifting ever closer to turning his fiction into a deadly threat, one not just to the target, but to Democracy itself.

I thought it appropriate to feature his talk on EV World because governments of the world (70 by Saurez's count) are developing and deploying unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs. While most of them are intended primarily for aerial surveillance purposes, both peaceful (crop surveys) and police (illegal immigrant movement), the United States made the decision under the George W. Bush, Dick Cheney Administration to arm its UAVs to find and kill Al Qaeda insurgents in America's 'war on terror,' a war that has also resulted in the death of numerous non-combatant bystanders, many of them women and children.

While long-range UAVs are conventionally-powered by gas-turbine and jet engines, many of the small, hand-launched models are electrically-powered, with companies like AeroVironment - who pioneered the modern electric car for General Motors in the form of the EV1 - supplying both military and civilian agencies with highly capable vehicles, which, despite their small size, could be armed for lethal self-destruct missions.

At the moment, most of these machines are controlled by human operators, sometimes nearby, often, as in the case of Predator drones, from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. But Saurez warns that three trends are nudging humans out of the picture.

The first is the sheer volume of data being collected makes it impossible for humans to analyze in real time. In 2004, US drones collected 71 hours of video for analysis. By 2011, this had exploded to more than 300,000 hours of video. And this is about to mushroom even more as new drone sensing technology can deploy up to 65 individual cameras on a single aircraft. He cautions that instead of human's telling computers what to look at, it will be the computers telling human's what to look for.

The second trend is the growing sophistication of electronic jamming. Nations like Iran are now able to jam or hijack the control of surveillance drones, as in the case of the RQ 170 unarmed Sentinel drone brought down over Iran in December 2011. To protect against similar embarrassing and potentially compromising events, future drones will have to have more autonomy; making more decisions on their own once tasked by their controllers.

The third factor is the growing technological sophistication of nations and corporations, including criminal enterprises, who can afford to build robots, both land, marine or aerial, offering what Suarez calls 'plausible deniability.' This could lead, he fears, to anonymous wars where the victim has no idea who attacked them. Using social network data from public sources like Twitter or Facebook, it now is possible to identify key people in any social network. This could enable a repressive governments or criminal cartels to target key people in these networks and use future killer robots to eliminate them, disrupting the network; thwarting political change.

To counter this looming threat, Suarez urges the creation of an international treaty on robotic weapons, including a ban on autonomous 'killer robots.'

"No robot should have the expectation of privacy in a public place," he states, calling for all robotic vehicles to have traceable cryptographic IDs burned into them at the time of their manufacture, and that citizens should have access to Apps that show the whereabouts of any robot at any given point in time. Transparency is the key, he says.

What he foresees is a darker side of our EV world, one that we not only need to be more cognizant of but also make sure we take steps to avoid as much as possible.

TED Talk Video

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