![]() Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00007506 | |||||||||
Military | |||||||||
Burgess COMMENTARY | |||||||||
Moral Robots for the Pentagon? Let’s Work on Pentagon Morality First
The Office of Naval Research (ONR), the think tank of the Navy, has put together a team to figure out how they can inject human morals into the computers of future fighting robots, so they will have judgment on who to kill and when. They have signed contracts totaling $7.5 million, employing outside consultants to further this goal. As outlined on the website Extreme Tech:
This project is being carried out by researchers from Tufts, Brown and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), with funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). ONR, like DARPA, is a wing of the Department of Defense that mainly deals with military R&D. While we're not yet at the point where military robots like BigDog have to decide which injured soldier to carry off the battlefield, or where UAVs can launch Hellfire missiles at terrorists without human intervention, it's very easy to imagine a future where autonomous robots are given responsibility for making those kinds of moral and ethical decisions in real time. In short, it's high time that we looked at the feasibility of infusing robots (or more accurately artificial intelligence) with circuits and subroutines that can analyze a situation and pick the right thing to do - just like a human. The DOD admits that it is a tricky task: It involves defining what human morality really is and what mores to choose. From Defense One:
I have a suggestion for the DOD. Before programing morals into robots, the department needs to do some self-examination, because the current practices of the DOD are no blueprint for morality. There are areas in the DOD that desperately need their humans to show some morality. After investigating the Pentagon for 35 years, I have seen great lapses of integrity. One could talk about the immorality of going to war on false pretenses, immorality in our military-run prisons including torture, the ongoing morality disaster of Guantanamo prison and many other injustices perpetrated by our Department of 'Defense.' But when it comes to the robots, it's crucial to consider the morality - or rather, the lack thereof - in our past and current weapons-buying system. DOD generals, civilian leaders and members of Congress have allowed, for decades, weapons that they know won't work to be used by our troops - and anyone else around who happens to be in their range. Back in 1980, I did my first military investigation of the C-5A cargo plane's proposed wing fix - a fix that was necessary because of bad planning and manufacturing. I looked into the history of the C-5A and studied the use of the C-5A for 'Operation Babylift,' an attempt to fly Vietnamese orphans to the United States, as South Vietnam's government began to collapse and the North Vietnamese were threatening to overtake Saigon. It was a classic public relations stunt. The C-5A was badly overrunning its budget and had manufacturing and technical problems - it was a model boondoggle. The Ford White House and the Pentagon planned to fly a number of Vietnamese orphans to the United States and have President Ford meet the plane that 'saved' them in San Diego. The plane took off on April 4, 1975, with 328 people aboard, 149 of them young children. Many of the people were in the troop-carrying section of the C-5A, which was located above the cavernous cargo section of the plane. However, in order to transport as many children as they could, the Air Force broke its own rules of allowing no passengers in the cargo section, and lined the floor of the cargo area with children and their caregivers. Not too long after takeoff, a rear cargo door blew off. The pilot could not make it back to the runway, and crash-landed in a field where the plane broke into several pieces. Out of the 328 occupants, 155 died. Out of the 152 people in the troop compartment, only three died, but 141 of the 149 orphans were killed. I read government reports on the crash and suspected that the poor manufacturing of the plane may have caused the cargo door to fail. But I came across a 1971 Air Force engineering report that warned in very strong terms about the danger of the C-5A cargo door system. One of the engineers wrote in the report that the complex rear cargo door was a 'monster system that was unreliable and unsafe.' He also recommended that the plane be grounded until the defect was fixed. Not only did people at the Pentagon use that plane in a baby-lift public relations stunt, but they also knew internally that this cargo door was defective - and covered it up. It revealed the 'morality' of the weapons procurement bureaucracy: They were willing to put lives at risk in order to save an overpriced and technically flawed plane. I remember my shock that the Pentagon was so morally bankrupt to risk this travesty. This type of dangerous deception by the military procurement bureaucracy has been going on for decades, and people have died as a result. It isn't as obvious as the shocking immorality in the Abu Ghraib prison, because the information drips out over time. It is complicated and is under heavy cover-up. Some of it is never known, because these weapons fail during war and everyone just assumes it was due to the war itself. I once debated a general before an audience of military officers about the weapons failures and deaths of troops and others, and he retorted, 'It's a fact of life that men die in war.' I infuriated him by answering that was true, but war was dangerous enough and we didn't have to kill our own troops. Here are a few past and current examples of this ongoing immorality in order to buy weapons and keep the huge DOD procurement budget going for promotions and contractor profits:
Wilson said that there were other pilots who were deeply concerned about the oxygen problem in the F-22 but were afraid to come forward. Wonder why? It was due to another immoral choice by the Pentagon to deny the problem and kill the messenger rather than to be concerned with the life of its pilots. • In February 2014,, The Washington Times did a two-part series on the failure of the Army's main rifle, the M4 carbine. Instead of trying to modify and fix the problems with the rifle that was sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army denied and hid the evidence. From The Washington Times: The Washington Times discovered Army internal documents that showed that the rifle had a problem of jamming in the desert, and rapid fire caused the barrel to explode and fail. This was not a small problem. According The Washington Times: So the Army had internal documents that showed that the rifle was defective and diverted to its usual immoral stand when it found a problem: cover-up. An Army historian tried to show the death that can happen from this form of immoral behavior but was censored. From The Washington Times:
This story has a tragic and eerie déjà vu quality to it. As extensively outlined in James Fallow's 1980 book, National Defense, the M-16 rifle that was used by most of the troops in Vietnam, has similar problems, including jamming. Troops were writing home to their parents telling them how jammed rifles were killing their comrades and asking them to send special cleaning fluid to try to keep the rifles working. The Army's response was first to deny the problem, and then try to sabotage anyone who worked to fix it. I could go on for pages on these stories from the past and ongoing current fraudulent weapons buying, but these examples clearly show that the military procurement institution in the DOD is more than willing to let troops be injured or killed rather than admit and fix problems. Most of the fixes are because people with a higher moral conscience stepped forward to expose the problem. Many of them paid the price with their careers or worse. So this is the military bureaucracy that is studying how to teach its new generation of weapons to make moral choices in the battlefield? Their track record makes this whole moral robot story sound like a ridiculous Jon Stewart skit, if it wasn't true and it wasn't killing people. They would be better off figuring how to change their entrenched and corrupt procurement system to inject morality into the top officials and program managers who buy their weapons in the first place. The solution? After so many years of exposing this horrifying type of immorality, I believe that they will only respond and start to change by exposure, ridicule, and most importantly, cutting their budgets. The Department of Justice and the military legal system should prosecute and discipline the top people who allow this to happen, or the president can, at any time, relieve them of their civilian position or their military command. Our troops and pilots don't deserve to die due the greed and careerism of their own people. Some final advice to the Pentagon: Leave the robot silliness alone for a while and dare to try to reform the morality of your humans. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. DINA RASOR Dina Rasor is an investigator, journalist and author. Rasor has been fighting waste while working for transparency and accountability in government for three decades. In 1981, Rasor founded the Project on Military Procurement (now called the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO) to serve as a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog over military and related government spending. Rasor's most recent book, 'Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War,' chronicles first-hand accounts of the devastating consequences of privatized war support for troops and the overall war effort in Iraq. She also founded the Bauman & Rasor Group that helps whistleblowers file lawsuits under the federal qui tam False Claims act and has been involved in cases which have returned over $100 million back to the US Treasury. RELATED STORIES Weapons That Will Never Die: We Need to Stop the Expensive Reincarnations By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions Weapons Sales to Iraq Move Ahead Despite US Worries By Michael S Schmidt, Eric Schmitt, The New York Times News Service | Report Pentagon May Be Wasting a Billion Dollars a Year in Erroneous Payments to Contractors By Richard H.P. Sia, The Center for Public Integrity | Report |