In this episode, The Changing Character of War Program welcomes Dr. Heather Ruff,
a senior research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
Dr. Ross Research investigates a future where machines, not humans, might be authorised to make and wage wars.
She joins us to talk about the moral quandary of autonomous weapons systems.
Today, I want to do two things. One is to situate the question of what an autonomous system is.
This has been a large debate going on in international debates right now at the United Nations with the ICRC and other member states.
Because I can walk into a room and say autonomous weapons system and somebody will think of a Roomba.
Another person might walk into a room and say,
I found this weapon system and think of a remotely piloted aircraft that has a human making, drafting decisions and flying.
And somebody else can walk into the room and say, Oh, the system will pick the Terminator.
So we have this very large division between what we mean by autonomous weapons systems, and the more and more you push on it,
the more and more you see that as the as you say, well, it does this and it does this and it does this.
The distinctions start to get quite fuzzy between what's the difference between an automated system and an autonomous one.
So this is my attempt to use kind of conceptual coherence and meet multiple
disciplinary discussions and definitions of autonomy to bring them together.
But they can all talk to one another and then problematise that a little bit, particularly from a moral perspective and philosophy.
And just we're thinking as well as we go thinking. So what is an autonomous weapons system?
According to the U.S. DOD directive 3,000.09 from 2012.
This is a system that can once activated selected engage targets without intervention by a human operator.
The the emphasis here is on select and engage and that's it.
How that comes about. Under what circumstances? For what time?
We don't know. This includes human supervised systems, something we think is really a window or perhaps a career rocket and water system as well,
if they're selecting and engaging and if the DOD says that's an autonomous weapons system,
but at present, they have excluded all existing systems from the discussion.
So the DOD says that everything we have currently in play is not an autonomous system.
Only future systems will be autonomous systems. That's also something to keep in mind in this country.
The UK emoji also has a policy position on on autonomous weapons systems.
These are the only two states publicly to come out with definition and or policy statements on weapon systems.
Out of the 186 systems that operate without human intervention in the weapon, command and control chain.
If you want to talk about they think this is a good place to start.
I also would submit that this is such a big and broad definition that it is so encompassing
because no military commander that I know or in I think the history of the world would say,
yes, please, can you give me a person or a system that operates outside of my command and control?
I love that. Military's don't like that.
Right? They want to be in control of the effects. They want to be in control of their forces.
So this is kind of an odd system or an odd situation of defining the system,
because what it does is it finds the the the threshold so high that nothing could ever really amount to an autonomous weapon system,
thereby saying when the UK when the UK claims to say that it will never adopt an autonomous weapons system,
it's because it's almost a possibility that any military would ever want to adopt something that has this characteristic.
Then we have the ICRC, the International Committee for the Red Cross,
and the ICRC basically takes what I would call a functionalist account to the definition.
They say something like a weapons system possesses autonomy in the critical functions, and they give some examples of what critical functions are.
These are not exclusive. These are not and they're not in total.
So this would be something like searching for an object, identifying, tracking,
intercepting, using force against, neutralising, damaging or destroying.
And again, without human intervention. But notice all of these definitions focus on various things either the functional capability of the system,
rather the action or decision that is being undertaken, or, let's just say in the UK case, fantastical things that will never exist.
I mean, this might as well say unicorn border and I will never use unicorns in the words.
So that so I think we have some big space and these are the publicly the best kind of publicly available definitions.
We have a president which makes it very hard when you're talking in international organisations about what to do, how to regulate.
And I've participated. There's been the last three years the United Nations has had an informal meeting of experts every year,
one week a year in Geneva under the auspices of the convention,
with certain conventional weapons to discuss whether to prohibit or regulate autonomous systems.
For the past two years, I've been an invited expert to give testimony to the member states about this.
And so I can tell you that these discussions are fraught and ultimately frustrating,
especially when you have somebody like the ICRC in the back of the room saying something like this.
We believe that this is important to have a clear, common understanding of what the object of discussion is,
and in particular what constitutes an autonomous weapon without engaging in a definition exercise.
There is a need to set the boundaries of discussion. Is it the Terminator?
Is it a unicorn or is it your Roomba? We need to know what it is we're regulating.
So boundaries boundary. So taking up the ICRC challenge, I launched a data project that has just come online.
If you're interested, it is a data set of autonomy and weapon systems of categories 284 systems on about 1314 indicators.
It's on the Global Security Initiative's website, and it attempts to take this critical functions approach and say, Well, where are we now and then?
Where are we going with empirical evidence? That's the conceptual and that's the empirical side.
This is the conceptual side that I'm going to give you today. So what would the boundaries be?
Initially, we have to think about what the boundaries between automated, which everybody thinks of as permissive and permissible and autonomous.
We can think of this in two distinct, but they might be two categories, right?
Some things are automated, some things are autonomous.
If you think of them in classes this way as distinctly, uniquely to take a dichotomy of two things you could say, well, on the automated account,
they might be something like they're predictable, they're reliable, the action, the the sensory input, and then the action is direct.
They're simple. They're dumb. This could be something like a Ford Auto manufacturing plant that is just, you know, popping out widgets.
Right. That would be something automated and it's perhaps better thought of as self prompted.
It can do something that its self prompts to do, but it's not taking into consideration its its own goals and its reasoning about its ends.
Autonomous, on the other hand, might be thought of as unpredictable, unreliable, indirect, complex, smart, and perhaps self-determining.
And these these ideas consistently get trotted out again and again.
But would it help if I dim the lights a bit? Or can people see dim the lights?
Because these are as I'm seeing some squinting happening so in an effort to.
Um. So, um. Okay, so that's one technology.
There you go. All right.
So often they're pitted against one another, and sometimes what is defined as autonomous is that which is just it's a negative definition.
That was that which is not automated. But sometimes we might want to think about this not as a distinct difference of classes,
but along a continuum that you could have automated on one end and autonomous on another,
and that there's all sorts of degrees of difference between the two and this continuum.
Some people say, you know, it's going to go all the way up to a point and then it magically becomes.
Autonomous. We're if there's any engineers in the room, this is a common understanding by levels of automation, but it's buried in place.
Sheridan played Sheridan from 1977, which was a discussion about levels of automation in Sheridan Think you've ten levels of automation.
And they said it starts with the human does everything. And then number ten, the machine does everything and then in between are randomly assigned,
I think quite rather arbitrarily assigned levels and they're supposed to be discrete doing these different jobs.
Um, I think that's actually the wrong way to look at it because from 1 to 8, it's human robot, from 2 to 8, it's human robot interaction.
And then one is human and the iceman, it's something completely different.
So it's quite odd to think of it this way, but this is another way that it gets discussed as a boundary.
I think all of these are insufficient ways of thinking about it, either as category mistakes or as levels of one kind of continuum going up.
And I'm lot more to think about the notion of complex adaptive systems and how complex adaptive systems have emergent properties.
And I'm thinking through this in my own work right now, and so I'm totally open to your suggestions of how to rethink this.
But I think there's something different about the notion of autonomy, particularly autonomy in weapons systems that is emergent.
It's an emergent property based system. So the great to San Paolo, I think we can get at this if we think of a great example, but reverse it.
So the grain of sand problem says, look, you might have a pile of sand.
You know, everybody can envision in their head a part of the sand. And you can take each integral individual grain of sand for weight.
And so all of a sudden it's no longer a pile of sand.
But the idea would be that you can't get to the idea or the kind of sand like qualities of the pile until you have a certain amount of sand there.
And you can't conceptualise it by saying it's this amount of grains of sand.
Likewise, you can think of this if that doesn't work for you with water for H2O is the water column right?
But H2O as a distinct kind of what is water doesn't get at the quality of wetness.
Wetness is an emergent property of water. So these are the kinds of things that I'm talking about.
So if we think that the critical functions and autonomous systems may all individually be automated,
that is, they can or they cannot do it and they may or may not be able to do it well or poorly.
But if you think of those as automated, but somehow when we put things together in a particular way,
there's something that is emergent, something that is more than the sum of its parts.
And then I think drawing from not just thinking about complex adaptive systems,
but ethics, then you say, well, what is it about autonomy that's particularly important?
And I think there's a couple of things here that we can learn from philosophy.
So one is that we can say, look, we in philosophy, when we have the question about, you know, the right thing to do, we do one or two things.
One, we can evaluate the action. Did it maximise some sort of good, good, some non moral good?
That's right. Is it you know, are you a consequentialist or utilitarian?
You're looking at the outcome and you're evaluating the outcome or the act.
Or sometimes you could say it's not. The act is the actually it's the is the quality of the agent who's acting.
So in more than two logical conceptions, you say, look,
it's my intention that I was I intending to do X, Y and Z regardless of what happened with the outcome.
So these are ways in which we sometimes think about the right thing to do an
evaluation of X when it comes to autonomous moral agents acting in various ways.
So I think if you put these two things together,
thinking about the timing weapons systems as well as what we're talking about or think, well, what is an autonomous weapons system?
What we want to do with it, I think we have to ultimately think about this as both.
Why do I think we it has to be both because an autonomous weapons system, as you'll see in a second, is something that is both objects and agent.
It is something that is not a moral agent, but it has agency, it has cognitive capacities in decision making.
It can do planning, artificial intelligence right now has.
We talk about artificial intelligence as agents can move around their environment, doing certain things, making decisions.
These have agency, but they might not be moral agents in the way that we think of them presently in and full of philosophical terms,
as a moral agent, as the subjects of rights and duties.
But it's also an object that in general, we would say we want to evaluate, you know, the task at hand and how well or poorly it does the task.
And this is something I think we can get our head around a bit more then.
So in a recent paper that I wrote with Professor David Davis of Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon,
we say that autonomy is about a system's ability to carry out a particular task assigned to it by someone or something,
maybe itself, without the intervention of the human operator,
where the performance depends upon various other capabilities or capacities related to its autonomy.
So for the for the philosophers in the room or the political theorist in the room,
you can think of this kind of as a as a throwback to Martha Nussbaum and her capabilities approach.
So what would be some of these general categories of capabilities?
Well, I think when it comes to a weapon system, we're going to have a bundle of things happening and we can divide them along three lines.
One line of combat capabilities will have to do with movement, because we're talking about something that's be moving around the time and space.
Even if that's non-kinetic, even if that's in the cyber system, it's got to be able to move within the network.
Then you can think about things like detection, right? Because I might give a direction for a weapons system to go attack a target X,
but it has to be able to detect that target once they're not selected, but detect it.
So this has to do with something about weapons, really, and detection.
And then finally, I think we're talking about a target system. We have to also take into consideration planning, learning and adaptation.
So if you think of these three things, these three general bundles of capabilities,
you can actually look at an existing weapons system and you can say, I'm going to categorise this into three indices.
My first index, we look at things like self mobility.
How well does an autonomous weapons system position itself in the world?
How that is? How does it go through purposive movement, through its environment to find a location to guide or home in on something.
So lots of precision guided munitions would fall in this area.
Self mobility. Some systems might be completely stationary.
You can think of kind of rocket and mortar systems on forward operating bases.
You might think, well, that's not right. I think, well, maybe a round version of a weapon on a ship.
Leadership is mobile or something, but you can start thinking about it in terms of how well is this thing moving around?
If it's just flailing about, that's not a good thing. The second one would be to think about self-direction.
And self-direction for me again, is how well a system can aim and employ weapons.
How how well can it aim at something? Detect that thing that it's aiming at and then employ weapons against it.
And so fire control issues, acquisition issues, does it have target acquisition?
Does it have automatic target? So automatic does it have automatic target recognition?
Does it have a secret? Well, what happens at the Seeker when you put something,
it looks at a certain area called an acquisition basket that has all these different things that are going inside its acquisition basket.
Can it do these types of things out of all of the known kind of capabilities and systems have?
And how many of those things does it have? Does it have none of them?
That would be bad, too. These would be done bombs.
And then I think the crux of it is when you add this this last this last bit here, which is self-determination,
and this is qualitatively different than the other two indexes, the other two elements.
And that is this idea is about cognition and volitional capacities.
So we want to understand how or whether a system can give itself goals, can formulate plans and act on those goals.
This to me involves higher order, cognitive and cognitive aspects.
So the cognitive aspect is what is the fact that I think, you know, what is the purpose of the factor, the idea or the general principle or the law?
What is the specific situation that I find myself in?
Does the specific fall under the general formulate reasoning and the analytical political thought?
But the cognitive part is like but the difference this is whether or not my subjective state of mind,
my feelings are actually working alongside my judgements in my my cognitive reasoning capacities.
And you might say to yourself, wow, factor off, you've completely gone off the wagon.
You're talking about emotions and machines.
And I would submit again that when we're talking about agents in multi-agent systems that would be able to go through
various higher order capabilities of undertaking a proportionality calculation in a particular instance of armed conflict.
It's exactly these kinds of emotive cognitive.
Bits that you would want to have. We also have work being done in artificial intelligence right now on artificial emotion and on various ways in which
you can use emotions or things like artificial hormones or pheromones to get systems to do what you want them to do.
So I don't think it's actually beyond the scope of possibility to think that you would have a system of an artificial agent
with cognitive capacities and something akin to an artificial emotion to help guide it on the right way to the right action.
I'll give you another example of what I mean by that. So how many of you in here have ever heard of a neural network?
How many of you in here have ever heard of a deep neural network?
How many of you in here have ever heard of a reinforcement learning deep neural network?
Okay, so a neural network is a way in which you give a computer.
It's a learning system. It's kind of the image recognition contact scene.
You know, you showed a picture and there are all sorts of massive amounts of data.
It's going to have certain input values and an output value.
And I can have a little hidden layer of nodes of neurones that don't know exactly how things are related.
It's trained to look at for various things, and then it's kind of set off and goes.
It's much more technical, but I'm not going to get into it. The Office But the idea here is that you're training it to recognise certain patterns.
And when you get that, when that pattern is right, you give it a reward just like you would a dog.
If you want to say, please sit to your dog and it just looks at you.
We sit this looks at you, and all of a sudden you maybe raise your hand and it sits down.
You, Oh, it's so great. You and the dog love that.
That's what you want me to do. Oh, okay. And then you do it again, and then you get a treat.
And all of a sudden, this reinforcement paradigm comes in so that it starts to recognise what it is you want it to do.
That's reinforcement learning. We've added that into the into how we do computational learning.
We give it points or values or relate things certain ways.
So this kind of weighting, this reinforcement is something like what we get as humans, right?
Which is we get a good feeling, we do something nice.
Or maybe if you're more deterministic, our hormones release nice endorphins when we do something that we think is nice,
however that works, it's a reinforcement of something good to tell us.
This is the right action. Do the right thing.
And if you're going to have an autonomous system acting in in amongst humans, we're out here away from humans, commanders.
But in a human population, you better be sure it's going to do the right things and uphold the law if you're going to undertake discrimination,
proportionality, assessing, precaution. But how do you teach it to do that when it's learning?
So this is why I think the cognitive capacities are equally important.
Okay, so I didn't like my little lines before.
Right. But I do think what you get is something like this.
So it's not two categories, it's not even one dimension, but it's actually, I think, a three dimensional space.
Multidimensional. You have self-direction, self-determination and sociability,
and you can imagine looking at a system and saying, where does it position itself along these three axes?
And then I can evaluate it somehow over these three axes. Now I'm a visual learner, so this is how I try to think of it in my head.
That is that somewhere along these lines the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.
It has some sort of emergence that we would call the time.
And it requires us to look at the functions and the capabilities as well as the
internal states of the agent acting its cognitive and quantitative disposition,
if you will, and then how these relate to the task at hand.
Or if you don't think about it in neuro terms, this task perhaps the goal that we give it.
I've been in conversations with various state officials and they will say things like an autonomous weapon system must understand commanders can have.
So just keep that nugget with you when you think that you have to.
It's not merely about the task, but it could also be about the goal, which is to comply with the rules of engagement,
the laws of armed conflict and commanders, and all of which are very nebulous concepts.
And in certain circumstances, we might think the principle is of distinction that you know about shalt not be indiscriminate with
relation to the use of force against civilians or civilian objects is a really easy rule to follow.
Except what if the civilian object is being used in a certain way that makes it a military objective that is by its nature, purpose, location or use.
Attacking it would give a direct military advantage. That's a more that's the what the law says.
But that's very contextual. Right.
The commander have to know at that time that that civilian train is actually transporting material, things like that.
So you need better, more content.
And thus you have to think about what we're asking the machine to do.
If it is a simple task, go on to our missiles right now.
Go on to a location in space, as we call it. Do you go on to a location facing or take the hill very broad or.
Understand commanders and time. If you still don't think you can understand what I'm talking about, here's a nice little 3D graph,
but it doesn't actually means nothing other than the fact that you could you can envision where systems may fall on the three axes.
So if you had a handful of systems that you were trying to measure, you could kind of place them in time and space to see you said,
Oh, up here in the red part, maybe we're going to start getting into some emergent autonomous capacities.
Okay. So you buy my argument, which is a big one to buy, but let's just say you buy American because I really like the submergence thing.
This is nuanced. Here's the rub. What exactly is the quality of the emergence?
What is the quality of autonomy here? Is it technological capability or is it something on the order of free will or moral agency?
We might say that somehow magically autonomy emerges from all these capabilities, but then what does the autonomy mean for the system?
And this, I think, is where our good pal Aristotle and the Greeks can help us.
So just when you thought it was safe to burn, your Arizonan must go back to.
Autonomous is typically thought of as in the Greek autonomous self-governing giving myself a laws and rules.
But in the Greek way of thinking about this, it's very much dependent on kind of a community self-determining, you know, all of the men.
Don't worry about those women, all of the men who are also free.
Don't worry about going into the public space, the agora, and then making a lot of costume remarks.
Right. This is the kind of self-determining that we were talking about when talking about autonomous.
So I don't think that's the kind of thing that we would want to identify with an autonomous system.
I don't see an autonomous system belonging to a community holding something in common, going and casting lots.
Signing up to be emperor for a day. I don't see that right.
What I do see is another concept in Greek that would be really helpful for us here and that is auto exist here and now.
To exist here is also a notion of autonomy. And it's about the power to act.
It's about having the authorisation act and having the required moral faculties that would allow one to be delegated an authorisation to act.
So if you don't. Again, I think examples are really helpful here.
So you can think of something like a power of attorney. A power of attorney says, I have, I am a self-determining agent.
But you know what? I can't do some things right now.
So, for example, my husband and I bought a house six months ago or so, and I happened to be in Oxford at the time.
I couldn't sign any of the papers, so I had to sign a power of attorney saying he can sign all of the papers for me.
I trust him within this scope, only with this scope, and then only in the scope of can you do this.
Then you can't do anything else. And so that would be me authorising.
I would take my authorisation and I'm delegated to him. He's capable of that.
That authorisation and delegation. So delegation to fly, whatever fly happens to be.
So what is the task then?
That we're trying to think about in relation to an autonomous weapons system that we're delegating in the kind of auto insincere way?
Well, at its most general level, I think it's a task to use force against the military objective,
whatever the quality of that force, whatever the objective has to be at its most general level.
It's this to achieve a military advantage.
Now, we could insert precaution, proportionate, all that stuff. I'm going to leave that out.
It's going to say at its most general, the task is to use force against the military objective to get military advantage.
Except when it's an autonomous weapons system, it's selecting which targets to use force against by itself.
Come. We come full circle back to U.S. Department of Defence Directive 30009.
It selects. Not merely detects. It selects which objects to achieve, to use force against, and perhaps even what kind of force to use against,
which then smuggles in all sorts of questions about precautions and proportionality.
So if we say then that they're being delegated this task now we have another question in front of us,
which is where does the authorisation to use force come from and how is it transmitted down to this system in a coherent way?
Well, we can look at where the power to declare war comes from.
So coming back to our lovely little just war theorists, we have the power to declare war would be an illegitimate authority.
Those who are, you know, authorising war, whatever that wherever that comes from the people, the king, whatever.
And then there are the authorised agents of war, and that is the armed forces who are undertaking those actions.
I have no idea yet where autonomous weapons fall in because they're an object and an agent at the same time.
So the power to declare war has traditionally been about illegitimate authority
and how and where and how and from where those agents receive these rights,
authorisations and obligations. It's all kind of meaningless, this kind of bottom up and top down at the same time.
So if it's a democracy, you could say that's the power to all powers and rights lies with the people, then the people through their representatives.
Right. Very lucky. And so Congress and so on.
American Congress has the power to declare war. Congress is the U.S. government is a legitimate authority.
The US armed forces are the legitimate authorised agents of war.
And when Congress authorises, which it does very rarely anymore, but if it does authorises war, gives it to the executive, go fight.
You are the head of the armed forces and through a chain of command, it goes all the way down to the PFC on the ground.
That's how it works, right? Once you get to the authorisation for agents to use force in war,
you say those authorised agents of war can do certain things, certain things that they cannot do in peacetime.
You can't go around shooting civilians in peacetime.
Depending on the situation, the more you make, they may be collateral damage.
They may be X, Y or Z. Not making moral judgements, whatever it is.
But there are certain permissions that you are allowed in armed conflict that you are not allowed to use.
And with those permissions to act come rights and responsibilities and obligations, we say something like the combatants privilege,
the combatant privilege is that they will not be tried if they're acting within
the bounds of armed conflict law where they will not be tried for murder.
They will only be tried for war crimes if they act outside of x allegation of armed conflict of the international between both.
If they surrender, they have the combatants privilege.
The P.O.W.s is not portrayed. So this is, again, this kind of notion of a right and a responsibility.
It's working at play here. So delegating the authorisation is to delegate the moral right to use force.
This is how it's been structured since we can think at least in more modern times.
Maybe not, you know, Syrian or more modern times.
Okay. But now we have to think about delegating moral rights to use force to non-royal agents.
And this gets us into a bit of a quagmire. So an autonomous weapon is a weapon that decides it doesn't matter what weapon is attached to it.
That is munition. They can have a precision guided munition.
It can have a gun, it can have a bomb, it can have a torpedo, it can have a laser, can have anything.
Now, we don't care about the munition.
We care about the autonomy in the decision making capacity of the system, that is, to select and engage in all the things that go on.
We have to think about selecting and engaging. So it's a weapon that decides.
But I'm not clear. I don't think anybody is clear at this point.
Well, I can say the technological state of technology now, it is clear.
But in the future, not so clear. It is not clear that such systems possess the requisite moral faculties to make decisions
that would allow them to have this authorisation delegated to them permissible.
So that is the technological capabilities of systems.
So if I offer a bone to the person who says these systems are going to be better but discriminating between combatants and non-combatants,
facial recognition is better in computers right now than it is in people.
These may be more humane to use. I'm going to offer that person a phone and then say, okay,
let's say for the sake of argument that these systems can distinguish between combatant and non-combatants better.
That's not sufficient. That's not sufficient to authorise the machine to take the decision to attack.
Because also under moral and legal rules, you have to also be able to take precaution and proportionate force.
And that is highly context sensitive.
And you can't use something like an artificial intelligence.
Go find good old fashioned and good old fashioned A.I. is not going to get you there.
It's too brittle.
You can't see all the possible permutations of what's going to happen in a battle space and how your adversary is going to adapt in that battle space.
So you have to have a learning system if you want to invest in systems that are going to protect you.
You want to be operationally effective, cost effective. That's a real learning system.
If that learning system is out there, you better hope it's smart enough to actually undertake out of the proportionality calculations.
But I don't think that's very likely because they're not human in the way that you and I think about human proportionality calculations.
But until they have greater cognitive and cognitive capacities, they just they're not going to be able to comply with moral and legal rules.
What is a good political theory is there was one that had one thing and oscillate a little bit more.
Right. But that's the almighty.
But if systems do possess these greater cognitive and kind of capacities, then they may be moral agents as well.
But if that's true, then they have rights and obligations too.
If we create the artificial general intelligence that A.I. specialists are trying to get to right now,
and they can do everything that we can do, it looks like a duck and walks like a duck.
Quacks like a duck. Then I'm.
Let's go this way. If if intel is, it is a moral agent.
I don't know why that thing over there would not be considered a moral agent.
So if that's true, they may have rights and obligations. And then there's all sorts of questions about conscription.
But until such a time that AWB possess the moral faculty to permit the delegating to happen,
the delegating of that authorisation to use force, I think it is morally permissible to task them with this choice.
They lack the moral as well as the technical capabilities to comply with moral and legal rules of armed conflict.
But the army but in cases of defence, their own narrow, very narrow cases.
I think you could probably see their utility, but I also think that you may not actually have to task them with the selecting bit.
So what do I mean? Well, if you had a system purely defensive and we can talk about purely defensive, purely offensive and everything in between,
but purely defensive, that is, it does not activate unless it senses an incoming mission,
munition or mortar or missile or something like this that is not you know, it's actively scanning all the time,
but it's not, you know, then you're like, oh, I just feel like today is the day.
Right now, it's actively it's only activated when it senses something incoming.
Then I think what's happening is it's not selecting a target.
The selection has come at some other point in time by some other agent.
It's detecting and then it's responding. I think selection has a very kind of grey.
It could be defensive in like these more kind of preventive defence and responding to a threat kind of terms.
Or it could be purely offensive, but I think we might square the circle by saying actually an autonomous weapons system
that's purely defensive might just have to respond and react to an incoming threat.
Incoming, not, not perceive, not look shadowy out there.
That guy looks a little shady, which we do have anomalous behaviour recognition in crowds that we're using.
And right now I think that would be a bad thing to put on a weapon system.
Um, so that's that kind of very restricted defensive reading I think would,
would mean that you would not permit the systems to preventively strike oh so good a monster.
And then I have a question, if that's true, we might just think of it as mere automation in some instances and not autonomy.
But for the most part, I think we have to kind of say that these systems are not where we want them to be.
And that's what autonomy, truly.
We cannot progressively allow them to undertake a.