Age of Unmanned Weapon

After gunpowder and nuclear bombs, AI (Artificial Intelligence) arms have been described as the third revolution in warfare because of its potentiality to mount a catastrophic attack on a huge scale. Many experts also believe that it would be the cause of world war 3. In 2015, reputed tech-leaders, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, signed an open letter calling on the United Nations to veto the development and use of AI weaponry. Stephen Hawking even warned that “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization”.

Let’s analyze the practical cases, it is estimated that during Obama’s presidency the number of American troops in war zones dropped by around 80 percent, but there were ten times more drone strikes. On January 2009, President Obama sanctioned his first drone strikes in Pakistan that killed around twenty civilians. In his two terms, Obama’s presidency authorized as many as 540 strikes and also normalized the use of armed drones in the name of counterterrorism. According to a new cross-functional team, America in on the process to enable its M1 tanks to control robotic wingman vehicles that can independently attack the enemy while shielding the manned tank. And it will be ready for soldier evaluations in fiscal 2020. In 2016 US launched an unmanned army ship called ‘Sea Hunter’ to hunt submarines and launch surface weapons. It was developed as a part of Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program. This ship will cost around 20 thousand dollars per day to operate, in comparison to the earlier human-crewed ship which cost around 700 thousand dollars. Following the trend, Russia is also on the verge to increase the development of unmanned drone tanks and autonomous armed vehicles to guard missile bases.

Autonomous weapons would be cheap for mass-production and may become easily available to ill minded dictators or terrorist on the black market. It’s also a future threat that commercial armed drones are rapidly advancing and private AI corporations are ahead than military. Sixty years ago when Adolf Hitler built a propaganda machine and was able to convince a large mass of people to slaughter millions of Jews. Imagine if Hitler has access to today’s AI? It really matters who hand those destructive technologies.

The public debate surrounding autonomous weapons often evokes fears of Terminator-style “killer robots.” This hypothetical future seems fantastical; however such killing robots already exist today in fetus form. Milrem Robotics, a Tech-firm based in Estonia, has invented a robot called THeMIS (Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry System), which can be armed with remote controllable large-caliber machine guns. It also consists of image recognition software and target-tracking system which can find people or objects as programmed. For now, it is a human-controlled system now, but there exist mechanisms for a robot with which it can independently act to identify the target and eliminate them.

The decision of using devastating weapons in battle has always been a matter of justified and rational choice of human being. This context may soon change. Advancements in AI, Machine learning and arm robotics marked new future of warfare, where Machine may find and slaughter people on the battlefield without human involvement. US, Russia, and China are initiating more research on unmanned weapons. The Defense Department has already promised to spend up to $2 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence (AI) systems for U.S. weaponry. Britain and Israel have already gone for with autonomous weapons by developing the missiles and drones that can find and attack rival’s radar, ship or vehicle, even in the absence of human command.

The era of unmanned weapons has already arrived in our doorstep. While talking of present-day situation, more than thirty nations have auto-weapons that can identify and eliminate target on their own. Paul Scharre, in his book “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War” has discussed the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of AI weapon. The inception of next-generation warfare — from Israel’s Harpy drone to America’s Sea Hunter, is a challenge to the human-centered security system. Technology in itself is not destructive; it’s the human intention and who has access to it. Many Scientist with all evidence believes that machine can exceed human intelligence and may even control the world’s networked weapons. With the advancement in the unmanned weapon system, we are blindly racing against time to reach nowhere than apocalypse end.

Arguments have been made for and against AI weapons; some supportive claims like replacing human soldiers by machines will yield well by reducing mortal casualties. The main question for today’s human civilization is, whether to begin global AI arms race or prevent of from happening? If the powerful counties like the US, China, and Russia move ahead with unmanned weapon competition, the global weapon race will be inevitable. Unlike nuclear artilleries, the tech-weapon is not so costly or hard to access, making it easy and cheap for mass production. It will take just some blink do decade that they will be auctioned in the underground market and terrorist or other ill-minded groups may get a hand on it. Apart from its destruction, some argue AI will reduce accidental casualties or military collateral damage by making fewer mistakes. A human soldier may make a mistake during a quick decision, but a robot will react as programmed and avoid damage situation.

AI weapons are a perfect mechanism for executing the elimination task like mass assassinations, threatening national security and selectively carnage a particular group. We, therefore, believe that such military arms race, in the long run, would bring the apocalyptic end of human civilization. The revolution in nuclear development brought the nations close to World War 3 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The third revolution posed by AI weapons may be even more unpredictable. So the international society should collectively plan for responding to the greater threat.