Lifeboat Foundation

US army’s report visualises augmented soldiers & killer robots.

The US Army’s recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050” describes a number of future war scenarios that raise vexing ethical dilemmas. Among the many tactical developments envisioned by the authors, a group of experts brought together by the US Army Research laboratory, three stand out as both plausible and fraught with moral challenges: augmented humans, directed-energy weapons, and autonomous killer robots. The first two technologies affect humans directly, and therefore present both military and medical ethical challenges. The third development, robots, would replace humans, and thus poses hard questions about implementing the law of war without any attending sense of justice.

Augmented humans. Drugs, brain-machine interfaces, neural prostheses, and genetic engineering are all technologies that may be used in the next few decades to enhance the fighting capability of soldiers, keep them alert, help them survive longer on less food, alleviate pain, and sharpen and strengthen their cognitive and physical capabilities. All raise serious ethical and bioethical difficulties.

Continue reading “Ethics on the near-future battlefield” »

Despite more than a thousand artificial-intelligence researchers signing an open letter this summer in an effort to ban autonomous weapons, Business Insider reports that China and Russia are in the process of creating self-sufficient killer robots, and in turn is putting pressure on the Pentagon to keep up.

“We know that China is already investing heavily in robotics and autonomy and the Russian Chief of General Staff [Valery Vasilevich] Gerasimov recently said that the Russian military is preparing to fight on a roboticized battlefield,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said during a national security forum on Monday.

Work added, “[Gerasimov] said, and I quote, ‘In the near future, it is possible that a complete roboticized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations.’”

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In the various incarnations of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a sentient robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android serves on the starship Heart of Gold. Because he is never assigned tasks that challenge his massive intellect, Marvin is horribly depressed, always quite bored, and a burden to the humans and aliens around him. But he does write nice lullabies.

While Marvin is a fictional robot, Scholar and Author David Gunkel predicts that sentient robots will soon be a fact of life and that mankind needs to start thinking about how we’ll treat such machines, at present and in the future.

For Gunkel, the question is about moral standing and how we decide if something does or does not have moral standing. As an example, Gunkel notes our children have moral standing, while a rock or our smartphone may not have moral consideration. From there, he said, the question becomes, where and how do we draw the line to decide who is inside and who is outside the moral community?

“Traditionally, the qualities for moral standing are things like rationality, sentience (and) the ability to use languages. Every entity that has these properties generally falls into the community of moral subjects,” Gunkel said. “The problem, over time, is that these properties have changed. They have not been consistent.”

Continue reading “When Will We Look Robots in the Eye?” »

““Our trust in complex systems stems mostly from understanding their predictability, whether it is nuclear reactors, lathe machines, or 18-wheelers; or of course, AI. If complex systems are not open to be used, extended, and learned about, they end up becoming yet another mysterious thing for us, ones that we end up praying to and mythifying. The more open we make AI, the better.””

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It seems like every day we’re warned about a new, AI-related threat that could ultimately bring about the end of humanity. According to Author and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, those existential risks aren’t so black and white, and an individual’s ability to influence those risks might surprise you.

Image Credit: TED

Bostrom defines an existential risk as one distinction of earth originating life or the permanent and drastic destruction of our future development, but he also notes that there is no single methodology that is applicable to all the different existential risks (as more technically elaborated upon in this Future of Humanity Institute study). Rather, he considers it an interdisciplinary endeavor.

“If you’re wondering about asteroids, we have telescopes, we can study them with, we can look at past crater impacts and derive hard statistical data on that,” he said. “We find that the risk of asteroids is extremely small and likewise for a few of the other risks that arrive from nature. But other really big existential risks are not in any direct way susceptible to this kind of rigorous quantification.”

Continue reading “Can The Existential Risk Of Artificial Intelligence Be Mitigated?” »

Image Credit: LinkedIn

As the line between tabloid media and mainstream media becomes more diffuse, news items such as Ebola, pit bulls, Deflategate, and Donald Trump can frequently generate a cocktail of public panic, scrutiny, and scorn before the news cycle moves on to the next sensational headline. According to Robotics Expert and self-proclaimed “Robot Psychiatrist” Dr. Joanne Pransky, the same phenomenon has happened in robotics, which can shape public perception and, by extension, the future development of robots and AI.

“The challenge, since robotics is just starting to come into the mainstream, is that most of the country is ignorant. So, if you believe what you read, then I think people have a very negative and inaccurate picture (of robotics),” Pransky said. “I spend a lot of time bashing negative headlines, such as ‘ROBOT KILLS HUMAN,’ when actually the human killed himself by not following proper safety standards. A lot of things are publicized about robotics, but there’s nothing about the robot in the article. It leads people on the wrong path.”

Continue reading “Is Media Attention Hindering The Development Of Artificial Intelligence?” »

Russell also signed the letter, but he says his view is less apocalyptic. He says that, until now, the field of artificial intelligence has been singularly focused on giving robots the ability to make “high-quality” decisions.

“At the moment, we don’t know how to give the robot what you might call human values,” he says.

But Russell believes that as this problem becomes clearer, it’s only natural that people will start to focus their energy on solving it.

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Advances in robotics and say that in less than fifty years “organic” (man) and the “mecca” (robots) supposedly coexist harmoniously in a civilization that if I imagine there will be little to change his ethics. MAKI360.

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Dr Michael Fossel comments on the recent Bioviva announcement of the first human gene therapy against aging.

The other day, a friend of mine, Liz Parrish, the CEO and founder of BioViva, made quite a splash when she injected herself with a viral vector containing genes for both telomerase and FST. Those in favor of what Liz did applaud her for her courage and her ability to move quickly and effectively in a landscape where red tape and regulatory concerns have – in the minds of some – impeded innovation and medical care. Those opposed to what Liz did have criticized her for moving too rapidly without sufficient concern for safety, ethics, or (from some critics) scientific rationale.

Many people have asked me to comment, both as an individual and as the founder of Telocyte. This occurs for two reasons. For one thing, I was the first person to ever advocate the use of telomerase as a clinical intervention, in discussions, in published journal articles, and in published books. My original JAMA articles (1997 and 1998), my first book on the topic (1996), and my textbook (2004) all clearly explained both the rational of and the implications for using telomerase as a therapeutic intervention to treat age-related disease. For another thing, Liz knew that our biotech firm, Telocyte, intends to do almost the same thing, but with a few crucial differences: we will only be using telomerase (hTERT) and we intend to pursue human trials that have FDA clearance, have full IRB agreement, and meet GMP (“Good Medical Production”) standards.

We cannot help but applaud Liz’s courage in using herself as a subject, a procedure with a long (and occasionally checkered) history in medical science. Using herself as the subject undercuts much of the ethical criticism that would be more pointed if she used other patients. Like many others, we also fully understand the urgent need for more effective therapeutic interventions: patients are not only suffering, but dying as we try to move ahead. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, for example (our primary therapeutic target at Telocyte), there are NO currently effective therapies, a history of universal failure in human trials for experimental therapies, and an enormous population of patients who are currently losing their souls and their lives to this disease. A slow, measured approach to finding a cure is scarcely welcome in such a context.

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