Robots, jobs, and war

Robotics was a focus of attention at National Instruments’ NIWeek event in Austin August 3-6, when presenters discussed the technical capabilities and ethical considerations surrounding robot use. Although the technical issues got most of the attention, it may be that the ethical ones that prove to be more difficult.

Consider mining accidents. The tragic deaths of six miners in the 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine disaster was compounded by the loss of three would-be rescuers ten days later. Could those three deaths have been averted had robots been able to perform the rescue reconnaissance?

Speaking at NIWeek, University of California at San Diego Prof. Thomas Bewley described the problems robots can face. Those small enough to access a mine tend to be too small to climb over obstacles they encounter once inside.

That’s a problem he and his students are addressing by finding ways to have small robots climb over large obstacles. A robot should "roll when possible," he said, but use multifunction mechanisms (wheels and plungers, for example) when necessary. Such robots demonstrated at NIWeek included iHop, a hopping robot with two wheels and two arms; iceCube, a self-propelled self-guided sphere with 3000-rpm gyroscopes; and Switchblade, a treaded robot that has a large mass mounted at the end of booms and that can "throw its weight around" to maneuver.

It would clearly be a significant benefit to have robots search for survivors in collapsed mines, sparing rescue workers the risk. But if such robots can reconnoiter collapsed mines, they could take over mining itself. Mining is a dangerous job, but is it better than no job at all? And in less dangerous jobs, is it ethical to substitute robots for humans?

Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis and author of "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World," writing in the Washington Post, doesn’t discuss the ethics of the situation but rather the consequences of what he takes to be the inevitable. He writes that the current downturn is a minor blip in technology-driven economic growth, and he cautions, "… the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology’s role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator."

Clark notes that unskilled workers have fared well throughout the industrial revolution. Although machines have replaced people as deliverers of brute force, he writes, today they cannot replace many of workers’ manipulative, language, and social skills. That will change, he writes, noting, "…computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man."

In a keynote address at NIWeek, Dr. David Barrett, Director of SCOPE (Senior Capstone Program in Engineering) at Olin College, described robots that are or will be taking over human tasks, including robots that will work in mining as well as industry, construction, and agriculture; as an example he showed a video of an autonomous tractor. And it’s not just unskilled workers that might have something to fear. Barrett described various medical robots, including ones that perform surgery.

So what should we do about people, whatever their skill levels, displaced by robots? Clark in the Post pictures a dystopia: "We could imagine cities where entire neighborhoods are populated by people on state support. In France, generous welfare has already produced huge suburban housing estates, les banlieues, populated with a substantially unemployed and immigrant population, parts of which have periodically burst into violent protest." To support such populations, he says, "You tax the winners—those with the still uniquely human skills, and those owning the capital and land—to provide for the losers."

Perhaps the most difficult problem of ethics related to robots centers on their use in the military. In a column titled "In search of empathy" in today’s Boston Globe, James Carroll writes, "When will the unempathetic Americans imagine what it feels like to have a robot monster bolt from the sky—the drones of August—and, in one strike, turn a wedding feast into a funeral?"

Barrett at NIWeek touched on the ethics of using robots in warfare—If we don’t do it, he said, our enemies will.

It’s inevitable that robots will take on more and more roles in military and nonmilitary applications. Where the true ethical question comes into play is how we address the consequences, and so far we have fallen short. We cannot continue turning weddings into funerals and turning middle-class neighborhoods into violent banlieues of the disaffected unemployed losers meagerly supported by taxing the winners.