Per la messa al bando delle armi autonome: ragioni morali e deliberazioni politiche

Vi è una spinta convergente all’autonomia operativa per mezzi militari terrestri, navali ed aerei che arriva a comprendere i compiti di riconoscimento e d’ingaggio di bersagli nemici. Per i compiti specifici da svolgere in autonomia, tali dispositivi godrebbero di autonomia operativa in quanto armi in grado di sopprimere un essere umano senza la previa autorizzazione di un altro essere umano. Si tratta di uno sviluppo tecnologicamente possibile che non ha precedenti in tutta la storia dei conflitti armati. Possiamo dare a una macchina la possibilità di uccidere un essere umano senza l’autorizzazione di un altro essere umano? Dobbiamo fermare lo sviluppo delle armi autonome? Ecco le domande principali che saranno analizzate e discusse in questo contributo. Lo sfondo teorico utilizzato per fornire una risposta a tali domande è quello delle teorie etiche normative, nella varietà delle teorie deontologiche e in quella delle teorie consequenzialiste

Le implicazioni etico-giuridiche delle nuove tecnologie robotiche e informatiche in campo militare tra lex lata e lex ferenda

In uno scritto pubblicato sul finire dello scorso millennio, Cristopher Greenwood elogiava la capacità dei principi internazionali sulla disciplina degli armamenti di affrontare le sfide poste dallo sviluppo di nuove tecnologie militari e fissava, come priorità per il secolo a venire, nongià l’adozionedi nuove norme (lex ferenda), quanto piuttosto l’effettiva applicazione dei quelle vigenti (lex lata). Questo breve contributo in tende verificare la correttezza di questo assunto alla luce dei recenti tentativi della comunità internazionale di dare una risposta alle questioni etico-giuridiche poste da tre tecnologie che stanno rivoluzionando il modo di fare e concepire la guerra (o promettono di farlo nel volgere di pochi decenni): i droni armati, gli attacchi informatici e i sistemi d’arma autonomi

I sistemi robotici ad autonomia crescente tra etica e diritto: quale ruolo per il controllo umano?

ABSTRACT (in English, main text in Italian): To be counted as operationally autonomous relative to the execution of some given task, a robotic system must be capable of performing that task without any human intervention after its activation. Recent progress in the fields of robotics and AI has paved the way to robots autonomously performing tasks that may significantly affect individual and collective interests, which are deemed as worthy of protection from both ethical and legal perspectives. The present contribution provides an overview of ensuing normative problems and identifies some ethically and legally grounded solutions to them. To this end, three case studies will be more closely scrutinized, i.e. increasingly autonomous weapons systems, vehicles, and surgical robots. These case studies are used to illustrate, respectively, the preliminary problem of whether we want to grant certain forms of autonomy to robotic systems, the problem of selecting appropriate ethical policies to control the behavior of autonomous robotic systems, and the problem of how to retain responsibility for misdoings of autonomous robotic systems. The analysis of these case studies brings out the key role played by human control in ethical and legal problem-solving strategies concerning the operational autonomy of robotic and AI systems

Social Robotics and Societies of Robots

The sustainability of social robotics, like other ambitious research programs, depends on the identification of lines of inquiry that are coherent with its visionary goals while satisfying more stringent constraints of feasibility and near-term payoffs. Within these constraints, this article outlines one line of inquiry that seems especially viable: development of a society of robots operating within the physical environments of everyday human life, developing rich robot–robot social exchanges, and yet, refraining from any physical contact with human beings. To pursue this line of inquiry effectively, sustained interactions between specialized research communities in robotics are needed. Notably, suitable robotic hand design and control principles must be adopted to achieve proper robotic manipulation of objects designed for human hands that one finds in human habitats. The Pisa-IIT SoftHand project promises to meet these manipulation needs by a principled combination of sensorimotor synergies and soft robotics actuation, which aims at capturing how the biomechanical structure and neural control strategies of the human hand interact so as to simplify and solve both control and sensing problems

A chunking mechanism in a neural system for the parallel processing of a propositional production rules

The problem of extracting more compact rules from a rule-based knowledge base is approached by means of a chunking mechanism implemented via a neural system. Taking advantage of the parallel processing potentialities of neural systems, the computational problem normally arising when introducing chuncking processes is overcome. Also the memory saturation effect is coped with using some sort of "forgetting" mechanism which allows the system to eliminate previously stored, but less often used chunks. Even though some connection weights are changed in the process of storing or discarding chunks, we emphasize that this neural system cannot be regarded as a "connectionist" system, since a localist semantic interpretation is adopted and no classical learning algorithm is employed

A chunking mechanism in a neural system for the parallel processing of a propositional production rules

The problem of extracting more compact rules from a rule-based knowledge base is approached by means of a chunking mechanism implemented via a neural system. Taking advantage of the parallel processing potentialities of neural systems, the computational problem normally arising when introducing chuncking processes is overcome. Also the memory saturation effect is coped with using some sort of "forgetting" mechanism which allows the system to eliminate previously stored, but less often used chunks. Even though some connection weights are changed in the process of storing or discarding chunks, we emphasize that this neural system cannot be regarded as a "connectionist" system, since a localist semantic interpretation is adopted and no classical learning algorithm is employed

Workshop of the ETHICBOTS project

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Autonomy in Weapons Systems. The Military Application of Artificial Intelligence as a Litmus Test for Germany’s New Foreign and Security Policy

The future international security landscape will be critically impacted by the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. With the advent of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and a currently unfolding transformation of warfare, we have reached a turning point and are facing a number of grave new legal, ethical and political concerns. In light of this, the Task Force on Disruptive Technologies and 21st Century Warfare, deployed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, argues that meaningful human control over weapon systems and the use of force must be retained. In their report, the task force authors offer recommendations to the German government and the German armed forces to that effect