Maybe Battlestar Galactica Was On to Something – Robots At War

A brief synopsis of the plot of Battlestar Galactica: Man created robots to do all the things he didn’t want to do, include fight wars. Then the robots rebelled and waged war against man.

We are part of the way there. Recently, a US drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a terrorist living in Yemen, who also happens to be a US citizen. The operation was covert and the US government has not acknowledged a) that the drone attack occurred, or b) that the Obama administration ordered the attack. Assuming that both are true, this introduces some troubling legal questions about the federal government’s right to kill a US citizen without a trial.

It is also an example of a relatively new area of international law: What constitutes an act of war when the act did not involve a human being? As the Washington Post noted, American drone attacks have raised questions “about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States.” Similar questions exist regarding potential cyber attacks caused by autonomous viruses on US utilities and government systems.

Even Ralph Nader has put down his “Vote Nader” sign and his car’s owner’s manual to advocate for an international treaty governing unmanned aerial vehicles. In his essay, he describes American drones as having questionable mortality.

I think Robert E. Lee put it more succinctly: “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” International law has developed, in part, in response to the terribleness of war. The danger with creating robots to do the things we don’t want to do is that we forget about the costs associated with them. International law could be weakened if, in the future, it develops in response to a lessened sense of terrible.