Tag Archives: authority

Trusting machines



Fool hu-mans, there is no escape!

The Wall Street Journal did a piece last week on drones that decide whether to fire on a target, provocatively titled “Could We Trust an Army of Killer Robots?”

Although the title goes for the sci-fi jugular, the article balances questions about robot decision making with concerns like those of Georgia Tech’s Mobile Robot Lab director Ronald Arkin:

His work has been motivated in large part by his concerns about the failures of human decision-makers in the heat of battle, especially in attacking targets that aren’t a threat. The robots “will not have the full moral reasoning capabilities of humans,” he explains, “but I believe they can—and this is a hypothesis—perform better than humans” [1]

In other words: Do we trust an army of people?

Drones might make better decisions in some contexts. Whether drones can be trusted is a whole ‘nother question.Read More… Trusting machines