The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Trillions of dollars each year are poured into developing new technologies that redefine the art of war.  And the next frontier of military technology will bring the world of science fiction into reality: fully autonomous weapons.  Supporters of autonomous weapons argue that it is imperative that we develop artificial intelligence capable of making tough decisions at an extraordinary speed.  They argue that this new technology will limit civilian casualties and avoid human error that inevitably costs lives.  They argue that these weapons will be necessary to combat hostile governments, and failing to invest in the future of warfare is an existential threat to the international order.  Without them, we risk a future of greater violence and fewer freedoms.  But there is another camp that feels the risk of these weapons is far too great for anyone to possess. They argue that the human cost of war serves as a deterrent, and without that deterrent, war will become more common and more brutal. Fully autonomous weapons will make it easier and cheaper to kill people, creating more death and destruction than is absolutely necessary.  They argue machines are incapable of fully understanding the value of a human life, and life and death decisions must not be left to AI. The only answer is for the use of autonomous weapons to be banned entirely.  Arguing for the motion is Bob Work, the 32nd United States Deputy Secretary of Defense for both the Obama and Trump administrations from 2014 to 2017 Arguing against the motion is Peter Asaro, Director of Graduate Program & Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School, with a focus on autonomous weapons from the perspective of just war theory and human rights. Bob Work: “I think very strongly that autonomy has made warfare more humane already and will make it even more so in the future.” Peter Asaro: “Making warfare more humane would be to reduce warfare and conflict. And by the very nature of automating warfare you are encouraging more conflict and more warfare because it's going to be cheaper.” Sources: NYT, Yahoo Finance, CBS News The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/ Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Jacob Lewis Editor: Reza Dahya Associate Producer: Abhi Raheja  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide. provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you the listener

with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. The same technology that is making your life easier is being weaponized. That feature that unlocks your phone with your face, here it is attached to a self-learning machine gun. That drone advertised to get awesome snowboarding shots? Here's one that doesn't require a pilot. This ad shows it with a high explosive warhead. It hangs out in the sky until it finds an enemy radar system, then crashes head first into it. In that driverless car you thought was so cool,

well, here it isn't tank form at a Russian arms fan. People say we'll never give control over lethal strike to our official intelligence. And I say, that's wrong. We absolutely will. Because at a certain point, you can't respond fast enough unless you do that. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, trillions of dollars each year are poured into developing new technologies

that redefine the art of war. And the next frontier for military technology will bring the world of science fiction into reality in our lifetimes. What am I talking about? Fully autonomous weapons. Supporters of autonomous weapons argue that they are imperative to developing artificial intelligences that can make battlefutable. field decisions at extraordinary speed with extraordinary accuracy.

They argued that these new forms of technology can limit civilian casualties, avoid human error, and pave the way for a more humane era of human conflict. President Biden met face-to-face, well, virtually with the Chinese president for the first time last night, but there's new concern at the Pentagon about China's military buildup, including development of a hypersonic missile. But there's another camp that feels that the risk of these weapons far outweighs any benefits they might confer. This group argues that the human cost of war is what has always served as a deterrent to conflict. And without that deterrent, war will become more common and more brutal.

Autonomous weapons will make it easier and cheaper to kill people. The only answer, as a result, is a ban on autonomous weapons now and forever. On this installment of the Monk debates, we aim to discover what the future of warfare may bring. By debating the motion, be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make war more humane. Arguing for the motion is Bob Work, the 32nd United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, who worked under both the Obama and Trump administrations from 2014 to 2017. Arguing against the motion is Peter Sotomay. Asaro, director of the graduate program and associate professor of media studies at the new school.

Peter has a special focus on autonomous weapons from the perspective of just war theory and human rights. Bob, Peter, welcome to the Mug Debates. Thanks for having me, Redia. Yeah, it's great to be here, Redia. Very topical, fascinating debate for us to weigh in on today on this program. We always love conversations like this that connect. different preoccupations we all have from technology to geopolitics to what is the future? What will this world in the 21st century look like?

And we've got an opportunity to line up all those dots with a great resolution today. Be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. Bob, you're arguing in favor of the motion. So let me put a couple minutes on our show clock and turn the program over to you. Thank you. Well, I'd actually argue that autonomous weapons have already made warfare more humane. Up until World War II, warfare could be described in broad brush as unguided weapons warfare. And what I mean by that is almost every projectile or bomb or torpedo or missile that was fired, dropped, or propelled missed their targets. In 1943, 1944 over Nazi Germany, the U.S. Air Force CEP for bombing a target in Germany was 3,300 feet.

Now, if you think about that for a second, that means that when the U.S. Air Force put 1,000 bombers over Schweinfurt, for example, and each bomber dropped 10, 500-pound bombs, 10,000 bombs would come raining down out of the sky, And only 50% of them 5,000 would fall within 3,300 feet of the target. And the other 50% would fall beyond 3,300 feet. So if you were living near the factory that was being bombed, you were as likely to be bombed as the factory itself. The U.S. military wanted to have better accuracy. So they started to put autonomous capabilities into weapons, which would allow them to home men on a target. Over time, CEP started to drop to mere yards. And what that meant is, instead of having to drop 10,000 bombs to try to get a hit on what you were shooting at, you might only have to

drop 10 bombs. And that reduced collateral damage to a enormous amount. All you have to do is look at the pictures of World War II and see the damage that was surrounding targets that we would go after. So the point here is we've been using autonomous weapons for eight decades. They have proven in combat to be reliable, safe, and we've used them consistent with international humanitarian law. Now what the Department of Defense wants to do is go after the next set of things that causes the most problem, and that is target misidentification. that causes 50% of what the department calls unintended engagements.

So the thinking is that using AI, you're going to improve on this, and you will not have these accidents that you might otherwise have. So that is why I think very strongly that autonomy has made warfare more humane already and will make it even more so in the future. Thank you, Bob. Fascinating opening statement. There are so many issues and ideas that you're raising. I'm really looking forward to unpacking them all with you as we continue with this debate.

Our next step is an opening statement from Peter arguing against our motion, be it resolved, autonomous weapons make warfare more humane. Peter, let's get your opening remarks. Sure. I think on the face of it, the proposition or the resolution is contradictory. The idea of removing humans and human responsibility from warfare somehow making warfare more humane just seems like a contradiction to me. And I think the real question is not one of precision or how do we get a weapon to a target. I think what's fundamentally changing when we're talking about autonomous weapons versus the history of guided and precision guided munitions is the selection of the target. And whether there's a human being or a group of human beings who are choosing what is a valid military target, is that a lawful target?

Is that a morally acceptable target under the laws of war and human morality? Or are we allowing a machine to use sensor data and algorithms to determine automatically whether something is or is not a target? And to make that final determination to use lethal force against that target. And that's really what we want to do is a campaign at the United Nations to get an international tree that would prohibit such kinds of weapons and instead require that all weapons system and all targeting of weapons systems involves meaningful human control. If there's no human sort of directly making a decision, there's the sort of indirect human responsibility of programming and designing of systems. You have the proliferation of these systems. You have arms races that could be caused by these systems. You have the instability that those cause in the lack of understanding between states

of what the capabilities of different weapon systems are, what the implications are of using them or of their adversaries using them against them, which leads to a whole set of geopolitical stability issues, as well as the possibility that these systems could fall into the hands of terrorists or autocratic states who would want to use them against their own people, and a whole host of issues that arise that we can preemptively prevent by not allowing the automatic targeting of humans, which also sets a principle for civilian applications

where we're going to see more and more automated decision-making about issues that directly impact people and the human rights of individuals. Thank you, Peter. Equally interesting set of issues you've raised there in your opening statement. let's go to rebuttals, a chance for both of you to kind of weigh in and react to what you've just heard. So, Bob, let's get your rebuttal up on deck first. I'll start by saying that the law of war does not prohibit the use of autonomy and weapon systems. As a result, DOD has had to create its own policy for the use of autonomy and weapon systems.

And that policy is very consistent in trying to allay the concerns that Peter has laid out. In fact, in the first couple sentences of the DOD instruction on autonomy and weapon systems, it says, this policy establishes guidelines designed to minimize the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements. That's a very important term in the Department of Defense. The laws and ethics of war really kind of focus almost exclusively on preventing or at least reducing physical harm and suffering, especially of non-combatants and especially of protected installations such as mosques or hospitals or other things like that. So the whole policy

of the Department of Defense and Autonomy and Weapons Systems is really designed to prevent that. And the key is all autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems under DOD policy have to be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. The Department of Defense believes, and this is a matter of debate, believes that this meets the intent of meaningful human control over these weapons. The one thing I agree with Peter a lot on is any type of automated command and control system that could autonomously order a preemptive or retaliatory strike is a system that we have to be extraordinary careful with. They might cause a flash war, for example, just like you see the flash crashes on the stock market. So those are the systems that I agree with Peter we have to be extremely cautious and careful about. But as far as the weapon systems themselves, I think they have proven to be very safe and reliable and are being used entirely consistently with the way Peter has outlined. Thanks, Bob, for that rebuttal.

Peter, your chance now to react to Bob's opening statement or what you've just heard now. Sure. So there's a body at the United Nations called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons that's been debating whether there is a need for new international law over autonomous weapons for the past eight years. And much of that has been focused on whether or how international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions and other aspects of international law, apply to these weapons. And there's universal consensus that those laws do apply. And there's a few countries that believe that they are sufficient for,

governing the development of these new technologies. But we've seen at least 20 countries so far, as well as the group of non-aligned countries, saying that, in fact, that they are not sufficient. There is a clear lack of clarity in terms of how these laws that were really designed to apply to humans and human commanders. And I think it's great that the United States and the Pentagon has been proactive in developing its own policies regarding this,

which to me also indicates that international law is insufficiently clear on exactly how it would apply in those cases, which is why they had to develop their own policy. But that policy only governs one country. And there's, you know, a hundred and some other countries out there who are using weapons and their militaries who don't have that policy. And there's no legally binding instrument that would force them to follow a policy like the U.S. And then there's, of course, questions about exactly what that should look like. in terms of how do we maintain human control over the decision process and targeting, what's sufficient, what's meaningful, and one of the implications for states that would violate such protocols. And I think what we really want is to create a clear kind of norm and a clear line

under which all attacks have to be authorized by humans who are responsible legally for them and can be held accountable for that. The whole categories of systems, particularly those that, specifically target humans and individual humans are prohibited outright because they reduce people to mere data points or patterns of data or sensor profiles or however you want to frame that within a computational representation. And that would protect human dignity and human rights more generally going forward as we see an evolution of this technology in many directions that we may not foresee at this point. Thank you, Peter.

You're listening to our Monk debate, be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. And Bob, my kind of responsibility now, try to think up some questions that are on the mind of listeners who've been tuning into this fascinating conversation between the two of you. And I think the first question that I want to put to you is, as someone who has worked at, you know, the very highest levels, the U.S. Defense Department, you would know that in war and at war planning, innovation and technology is constantly. constantly sought out by the U.S. and its competitors as an advantage, as an advantage to either project deterrence or as an offensive capability. And I want to hear a bit more from you as to why you feel that the norms that you've described are going to hold into this uncertain future that we're entering into. What is going to stop, for instance, a regime like China or Russia from removing any and all human permissions for speeding up the reactive capacities of

these autonomous systems. And to what extent could the United States just simply sit there passively as your peer competitors, for reasons of their own strategic and tactical advantage, you know, constantly push on the limits of autonomous technology. I want to hear you paint a picture a bit more of how autonomous weapons fit into a strategic doctrine vis-a-vis America's peer competitors. Well, I think the basic underlying premise of your question is, should we be talking to China and Russia right now about these weapons? And should we agree among ourselves the boundaries that we are all comfortable using? I think the first place to start, for example, would be let's all agree that no autonomous weapon system touches nuclear weapons.

Let's just all agree to that. And I believe, you know, that is something that both the Chinese and the Russians would probably say, yeah, let's talk about that. How would we go about making sure that all of us do this? But to your specific point, the U.S. is confident that it can utilize. these weapons entirely consistent with international humanitarian law. It's established policies, it established principles. I think it is leading the world and thinking about how we're going to use these weapons. But as you point out, if we got into a war and it became evident that China or Russia or another competitor were using completely autonomous weapon systems and they were providing

our adversaries with an advantage on the battlefield, what would we do then? Would we stick with our principles or would we say, look, we can't afford not to follow their lead because it's given an advantage in battle that we cannot tolerate? This is a debate that's going on inside the Department of Defense from the very beginning in 2012 when we started thinking about these weapons. So it's important that we engage with all of our competitors. And the only thing that the U.S. disagrees with Peter really is we should not have a preemptive ban. We've been using autonomous weapons for 80 years. And if whatever ban that came about prevented us from using the weapons that we have in the system right now,

the only alternative would be to go back to unguided weapons, which we know are more destructive, cause more harm, cause more damage. And I just couldn't conceive of that future. So in my view, the Department of Defense is absolutely certain it can do this consistent with international humanitarian law. But I think the Department of Defense is willing to talk with anybody about how we should approach the problem. So, Peter, let's get you to kick the can a bit further down the road for us here. I mean, what Bob is describing here is, yeah, there's going to be deterrence. Just as there was deterrence with nuclear weapons and other forms of weapons, there's going to be deterrence that will modify competitors' behavior when it comes to using this technology. Because everything they might do in terms of taking, you know, human permission out of targeting decisions or, you know, rapid strike. capacity. Well, the United States could do that also. So why do we need a formal ban? Why can't we allow these longstanding patterns of deterrence and counterforce to ameliorate some of the, albeit, scary, possibly negative effects of autonomous weapon systems? So I think there's two good reasons

for thinking about a ban as being in the mutual interest of both great powers and all the countries of the world. And I think the first of those is the logic of the arms race itself, which is, well, we may not necessarily want to build this or use this, but if, you know, our adversaries do, then we have to be prepared to. And well, we might as well get started right now. And, of course, they're using that same logic. And that drives states to spend lots of resources building weapons systems that they may not feel morally or legally comfortable with. And of course, it's a drain on resources that could be spent elsewhere for other things. And you avoid that sort of arms race by having these kinds of treaties in place.

And I think the other thing that's somewhat interesting about, you know, Bob's comments there was, you know, we should all agree. And it seems obvious that we wouldn't want autonomous control of nuclear weapons. And we shouldn't have nuclear weapons at all, perhaps. And I believe that for sure. but we look at the use of autonomy over a long period of time, it could also kill very many people, and there are arguments that these sorts of weapons

could themselves become a new form of a weapon of mass destruction in terms of a weapon system that could be deployed by an individual or a small group of people and have mass casualty effects over a large population because a small group could deploy an army of little robots that could kill lots and lots of people, which maybe the numbers don't quite match the nuclear weapon systems, but it's a potentiality that we have to consider. And that is another reason to ban these systems. Well, let me just come to Bob in that point, because you raised an

interesting one that it was certainly on my mind, is that Bob, is there a risk here that these weapons make, they lower the cost of war, and therefore they remove a deterrent. And I specifically think of domestic political opinion and how political actors in democratic or authoritarian regimes are often limited by the destabilizing effects of mass casualties. And if we remove the human cost of war and push this over to, in a sense, robots fighting each other, why doesn't that increase? the likelihood of war going forward, and that in itself, you know, raises all these bigger, serious kind of existential risks of escalation, of human calamity. Well, there's no evidence right now that anybody is really pursuing the type of autonomous weapons that I think many of the viewers, our listeners, might be thinking about.

The Department of Defense distinguishes between semi-autonomous weapons and autonomous weapons. And a semi-autonomous weapon is when the human chooses the target and then lets the weapon fly. And these are known as fire and forget weapons. So the human has selected the target. The missile is simply completing the kill chain. The missile isn't deciding that it's going to shoot down. a particular airplane or a submarine or whatever. It's just doing the bidding of the human, which, in my view, meets the criteria for a meaningful

human control. So, in other words, a semi-autonomous weapon, the human chooses the target and then turns on the weapon. An autonomous weapon is when you turn on the weapon and it chooses the target. The U.S. really has had, in my view, one weapon like that. It was called the Captor torpedo. And what you would do is you would lay this torpedo. It was a mine on the seabed. And it had an upward-looking sonar, which is a sensor that detects sound. And what it would do is it would listen at the time for Soviet submarines. And if the Soviet submarine came within the cone of the sonar and it met the sonar signature that was in the automated target library,

the machine by itself would fire the torpedo and it would home in on the submarine and kill it. That is no longer in service. And the way we used it is we would have told our allies where we laid our minefields so their submarines wouldn't be anywhere near it. There were no civilian targets in the area under sea, it would reject surface ships so you wouldn't have to worry about it going after a merchant ship. And so you were able to limit the chance of an unintended engagement to an extraordinarily low probability. The only other one we had was a little missile called lowcast that was supposed to go out and look for missile launchers. And if it found the missile launchers, it could attack them on their own.

But even then, the humans said, I believe there are missile launchers in this area. I have satisfied myself. There are no allies operated in the area. The number of civilians in the operating area are extremely low, and so you let this fly. But even then, the U.S. decided not to deploy the weapon because they were afraid of an unintended engagement.

The reason I'm telling you, this, Rudya, the Department of Defense has been extraordinarily capable, I mean careful, extraordinarily careful about pursuing true autonomous weapons. And there's no real record that the Russians and the Chinese are pursuing these type weapons. Most of the things we have seen have been semi-autonomous where a commander chooses the target and the missile or the torpedo or whatever it is just completes the engagement. I think of it in terms of a K-9 patrolman. The K-9 patrolman is out. He sees a bad guy. The dog alerts and the handler tells the dog to go after the bad guy. And he releases the dog. The dog does it all on his own from that point on. Okay, let's hear Peter come back. This is an interesting

distinction in this debate. I'm just curious if Peter's willing to acknowledge it. Are we debating today that fully autonomous weapons are inhumane? Or, Peter, do you feel that semi-autonomous weapons, Lassie on a leash, so to speak, is also something that you would like to see banned through this UN convention or in terms of our attitudes about conflict and war? I think Bob is given a very good argument for semi-autonomous weapons, but there are autonomous weapons and the possibility of autonomous weapons. Those are the things. Those are the things. thing we're trying to ban, and it's because of those dangers. Certainly semi-autonomous weapons have been in use, as we said, with guided munitions. I think there's also a strong argument

to be made that missile defense systems are doing a form of automatic targeting because they're selecting incoming missiles faster than a human operator would be capable of doing that when you're talking about a barrage of missiles in the case of, say, Israel's Iron Dome system or the U.S. phalanx or sea whiz systems, but there's meaningful human control and the supervision of those kinds of weapons. And as Bob points out, like the use of those weapons is in highly limited, highly constrained spaces where you can, you know, very well define what's happening and limit these probabilities and risks at a very great degree. And that needs to be established in law that Those are the kinds of requirements for the use of those sorts of targeting systems.

And if you, you know, because now we have self-driving cars and robots and little drones. And the technology for artificial intelligence and machine autonomy has been developing very rapidly in the last decade. And the promise and possibility of these technologies and you talk to defense contractors and weapons manufacturers. And they're very excited to build all these these new. things. And I think, you know, the long-standing logic of the Pentagon that is very hesitant to use these kinds of full autonomous systems is the right sort of approach. And the risk is that being seduced by these new technologies and thinking that, well, we can we can just automate this. We can just eliminate the human decision from this process. And these systems are going to perform

great because this technology is great. And to come back to your original question to Bob, I mean, I think these are very destabilizing for these reasons. And, you know, even just to think of it as the great powers developing these weapons and their sort of strategic standoff with each other, there's a very real possibility of small countries acquiring these weapons in large numbers and actually shifting the balance of power. You know, it might be much easier to eliminate an aircraft carrier with a fleet of little drones than it is to build another aircraft carrier.

So, you know, the whole kind of geopolitical stability that we have with the kind of military strategy at the moment could be radically shifted, including nuclear stability where you have little submarines chasing after nuclear submarines that could, you know, eliminate this kind of nuclear triad of defense mechanisms that the U.S. and Russia are using to sort of keep each other in check. And that kind of destabilization could be devastating. So, Bob, let's talk about destabilization because that's an interesting part of our resolution today, be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. I think it'd be interesting for the audience to hear a bit more as to maybe, I don't characterize it as optimism, but your considered opinion that the escalation and proliferation of these technologies will happen in a more orderly and mutually-guer. kind of negotiated way because I think, Bob, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe

recently there was the use of an autonomous drone. Was it in Libya, a Turkish drone to attack a convoy? Yes. So, I mean, this technology is out there right now. Groups who are anything but great powers are using it. Doesn't that suggest kind of the genie is out of the bottle and we're going to be playing catch up? Well, the genie is out of the bottle. As I said, these types of weapons have been around for eight decades, more, and different types of the weapons are being developed. And so you can buy these commercially from Turkey or China. So they are going to be in use, and they have been used. And unfortunately, there are always going to be bad actors who use any type of technology in ways that are malign or dangerous to other.

people. And, you know, that is something we all have to be a guard on. But the bottom line is the record up to this date is that most autonomous weapons are either semi-autonomous. The operator chooses the target and then lets the weapon fly. And what Peter described is what the Department of Defense refers to as a human supervised autonomous weapon. It has an automatic mode that you flip the switch, and it does it all on its own. But the commander is watching the machine like a hawk. And if the machine starts acting in a way that it shouldn't be, then the commander just has to hit the off button.

So, as I said, one of the difficulties, Rudya, and I think Peter would agree with this, is there is no agreed upon definition for what we are trying to ban. What I hear many times when debating my colleagues on these is they're describing a weapon that operates outside of the human command and control loop. They're unsupervised in their battlefield operations and they can independently self-target. I will tell you that there is not a commander in the Department of Defense who would, I believe, I can't say. I can't say that. That's a little too much. But very few commanders are going to want to have a weapon like that. Because under DOD policy, it's the commander who releases the weapon that is responsible for IHL problems.

What's IHL? International humanitarian law. In other words, if a commander uses an autonomous weapon and the autonomous weapon does something and creates an inadvertent. engagement attacks a restricted area or something like that, DOD policy is very straightforward. You can't hold the weapon responsible. You hold the commander responsible. So the Department Defense is very, very careful about this. And as I said, they're absolutely confident. And what they wouldn't want to have happened is the weapons that we have been using successfully and safely and reliably for eight decades, gets swept up into the ban, and then what do you do then? Well, the only option that you have at that point is to go back to unguided weapons, which I think would be a travesty. It would be an inhumane decision to do that.

Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly Monk Members Only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.com.com.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Peter, before we go to closing statements, let me just try one more argument out on here. It's somewhat futuristic, so bear with me, but I'm sure you're familiar with it. There's an idea that the future of warfare could be autonomous, robotic, and other systems,

fighting it out without large-scale human casualties. that wars would be decided possibly by these AI, you know, commanders in the background, they're almost instantaneously. Either side would know within a very short period of time, whether they'd won or lost. Wouldn't that be ultimately the most humane form of warfare to give it over to the machines? Remove ourselves from it. Embrace its autonomy. me. Sure. And, you know, historically, there's stories of armies meeting on the battlefield and sending forth their strongest fighter, David and Goliath, right, to stand and fight. And everybody else just watches and then accepts the victory of whoever wins. If you could get states to agree

to do that, maybe we could just, you know, play football or soccer or something instead. And, you know, we're creating a strange little game where we, you know, destroy, you know, destroy each other's robots is one way that might happen. But I think if you think about how war would actually unfold between states, so would both states have robots at the beginning? You know, in most cases, I think initially you're going to have an asymmetric war where one state has access to this technology and the other state doesn't. And we've seen that with drone warfare already. And then even if you had two, say, large powers that both use these sorts of systems, eventually they'd run out of them. And then are they going to capitulate at that point? Or are they

going to continue fighting with traditional human soldiers and personnel and vehicles and things? So, yeah, I mean, I don't think you're going to give up the autonomy of your state just because you run out of robots. You're just going to fight by other means. So I think, you know, science fiction has been offered interesting suggestions along these lines. And ultimately, you know, war is a sociocultural phenomenon. And we don't have to continue fighting war. It's not sort of a natural state of humanity. It's something we choose to do. And it's something that expresses our cultural beliefs about power in the world and these sorts of things. And we could fight it in different ways. And we have the opportunity. These systems aren't inevitable. We have banned other kinds of weapon

systems 100 years ago, chemical weapons were the hot new technology that we're going to make warfare incredibly clean and humane and no more blood and guts. We'll just gas each other. And then we saw in World War I with the consequences of that, and we saw that it wasn't humane at all. And we banned it. So I think we can do the same thing with these sorts of weapons. So Bob, final question for you before we go to closing statements. You know, isn't this all deeply not in America's interests. I mean, don't these technologies advantage your competitors like Russia that thrive on these asymmetrical kind of technologies and tactics? So, you know, Peter referenced earlier, are we going to have swarms of drones taking out a multi-billion-dollar U.S. aircraft carrier, drones that might cost an absolute fraction.

of what it required to build that carrier. I mean, why aren't the people in the Department of Defense your former colleagues thinking about this is something that just renders a lot of your force posture, your current military industrial technology and resources, you know, dangerously obsolete and advantages some of your worst and most pernicious competitors? Well, this is the typical back and forth

that goes on between military competitors. You know, the guided munitions regime that we live in now, all of the major competitors have guided munitions, all of them plan on using them in war. And it does make war very lethal because it used to be most of the things that you fired missed their targets. Now most of the things you fire actually hit their targets. So they have made the war more lethal between combatants, but at the same time, they've made it more humane for non-combatants because the competitors are shooting at each other very accurately, and they are not causing near as much collateral damage or civilian casualties as it used to be. the U.S. is very concerned about how competitors might use them. And Peter is exactly right.

Drone swarms are being talked about by all of the major competitors. And there's a lot of research on trying to be able to control the swarms, making the swarms operate more intelligently. And it's going to be a very big challenge in the future. But that's a far cry from saying that these weapons are going to destabilize warfare. As I said, the thing that I worry about as far as destabilization are control systems that can order a preemptive or a retaliatory strike. I am scared of those type of systems, and I would hope we all try to avoid deploying them. But I don't see how you stop the deployment of guided munitions and autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons. I would just like to say a lot of times in these debates, people say, look, we don't want

these weapons to target humans because it robs them of their dignity or something like that. But then I say, well, is it okay then to shoot down an airplane that has a crew of maybe 10 humans? And if you say, yes, it's okay to shoot down the airplane, haven't you then reduce the human crew to nothing more than a component in a weapon system, that is more dehumanitizing than anything I can think of. So that's why the Department of Defense has said, look, this really is all about trying to prevent or at best reduce the physical harm against non-combatants and protected entities. And if you focus on that, then I think you get to a good place. Let's go to closing statements. So, Peter, you're up first a couple of minutes on the clock here just to wrap up your key thoughts,

the remaining idea or two that you want to leave our audience with as they ponder our resolution today and where they stand on the question, be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. So I think part of the idea of making warfare more humane would be to reduce warfare and conflict. And the nature of automation has always been to increase efficiency and decrease costs. And that includes risks and that includes political costs. And by the very nature of automating warfare, you are encouraging more conflict and more warfare because it's going to be cheaper. It's going to cost less monetarily. It's going to cost less politically.

That's going to lead to more conflict. The thing that generally avoids conflict is being. able to negotiate, being able to reach mutual understanding and agreement, being able, even with our adversaries, to reach military stability. And what all of these technologies also do is add a great deal of unpredictability, an uncertainty, unforeseeability, and how they're going to operate in the real world, how they're going to operate when they engage other autonomous systems, which is intrinsically unpredictable. And when we reach a crisis situation, and military and political leaders have to decide, well, are they going to use this technology? Are they not? Is that technology going to be effective or not? We're just increasing all of this uncertainty.

And all of that is going to contribute to greater uncertainty, a greater crisis and greater potentials for the use of force and military action. And, of course, technology is constantly promising this clean, efficient, precise sort of warfare that makes. it politically more desirable than, say, a political negotiation to resolve a crisis. And all of that points away from humanity to me. And I think what we want to do is encourage the political discourse, encourage non-military interventions to solve these sorts of crises, and lowering the risks of conflict and the risk within conflict to civilians and civilian infrastructure. And to reiterate the point about cybersecurity, we were already seeing, of course, cyber warfare and attacks on information systems becoming more and more sophisticated and more

dangerous. And now we're talking about giving control over the lethality of our weapon systems to those same computer and information systems that are susceptible to those sorts of attacks, which just seems to introduce a whole other sort of realm of risk. And so you just don't want those kinds of systems to be readily available in the marketplace. And I think all together, those arguments point to trying to preserve human rights and human dignity by prohibiting these systems and that that's the most humane path forward. Thank you. Excellent closing statements. So, Bob, as per debate convention, we're going to give you the last word.

In our discussion today on be it resolved, autonomous weapons will make warfare more humane. Wrap up this debate for us. There's two ways in which autonomous weapons can make warfare more humane. One, we can already see in a very vivid way. Because autonomous weapons, semi-autonomous weapons, fire and forget weapons, are so much more accurate than the unguided weapons that they replaced. the number of weapons that you have to fire at a target are far fewer. The accuracy of those weapons is far higher. It means that you can have smaller warheads to achieve the same effects on the target.

And all of these things, at least in the way, American way of war, has dramatically reduced collateral damage and unintended engagements of civilians. We haven't eliminated them in. entirely by any stretch of the imagination. Unfortunately, accidents will occur in war, and they will continue to, no matter whether or not we have machines or not. The second way to make it more humane now is to get better at identifying targets. 50% of all of the casualties in Afghanistan that were either civilians or U.S. service members in a fractured side incident or allies were caused by target misidentification.

And in every case, those misidentifications were made by humans. Humans staring at a screen trying to determine if what the person was carrying was a rifle or a rake. And humans have made mistake, and that is one of the biggest causes of unintended engagements. we owe it to ourselves as a moral requirement to test and see whether or not autonomous target identification can be improved to the point where we improve upon 50% of all unintended casualties. The Department of Defense is absolutely certain it can. It believes it can do testing, evaluation, validation, and verification, of the weapons so we can actually test them before we use them to give us the confidence that we would need to actually employ them on the battlefield. These type of weapons, in my view, have already made war more humane and will make it more so in the future.

Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Peter, for a fascinating far-reaching debate. We did exactly what I hoped in this conversation, which was kind of linked these fascinating fields of strategy, military strategy, technology, technology, ethics together into a far-ranging conversation. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you both so much for coming on the program. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Bob Wark, Peter Asarro, for participating in terrific,

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