The Volokh Conspiracy

Just in time for President Obama’s big speech Thursday at the National Defense University on counterterrorism policy and strategy, Commentary Magazine has made available early my June cover article, “The Case for Drones.”  (Available free and not behind the subscriber wall.)  It’s a long essay arguing that drones are both effective and ethical, and addressing a number of the objections to each of those propositions.

The article has a particular audience in mind. It is aimed at conservatives and Republican members of Congress especially, to remind them that their sometimes knee-jerk attacks on the “imperial” Obama presidency risks one major piece of national security that the Obama administration has got well and truly right.  There’s no lack of imperial presidency, abuse of power material for conservatives to work with- pick your issue this week – but this particular issue is one where, if conservatives look down the road, they ought to see that any president, Republican or Democrat, will need to have available the national security tools of drone warfare and national security.  It would be a remarkably foolish thing if, by inattention or inappropriate and merely reflexive attacks on the Obama administration’s drone policy, Republicans in Congress wound up permitting drone warfare to be made politically, morally, or legally illegitimate – just as a future Republican president enters office and discovers that, yes, there are terrorist threats best addressed by drones.  Congressional Republicans, in the midst of the many abuse of power hearings, ought nonetheless to be scheduling hearings to invite current and former administration officials to reiterate their legal views on drone warfare, with the express purpose of standing with the President on this tool of national security and its permanent, legal, and legitimate place.

Commentary is a conservative magazine, obviously, and I’m writing there as a conservative for a conservative audience.  The framing above is political.  But there’s a much more neutral, less political way of framing the issue that ought equally to appeal to the broad national security center across both parties: the core elements of US counterterrorism policy, including detention policy and the whole range of what I’ve sometimes called “counterterrorism-on-offense” (including drones), needs to be put on a much firmer and more permanent basis.

Call this “institutional settlement” in counterterrorism strategy.  We need an institutional settlement around counterterrorism – we have a lot of policies that work pretty well, but they rely largely on executive branch discretion.  There are substantive reforms that need to be made in order to institutionalize counterterrorism policies, and they depend upon the two political branches coming together to give them legitimacy.  In my view there is broad agreement in the center as to these policies in substance; what they lack is a political foundation in actual legislation.  (But giving important credit, let’s note that Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) has just offered legislation that would begin to address legislatively the accountability and oversight issues created by the growth of military special operations; on my first read, it looks like a very good start.)

The fault lies both with the administration and with Congress, but one way or another we today owe it to whoever is responsible for national security tomorrow to make sure that there is a stable, functional, institutionally legitimate framework going forward.  It won’t ever satisfy certain constituencies ever – a big chunk of the international community, Obama’s leftwing, or the Pauline wing of the Republican Party, which are simply at odds with the substance – but it is the pretty clear view of the broad center of both voters and this country’s leadership.  That said, precisely the fact that in the political center most everybody’s on board with the substance means that it’s hard to generate energy to give it the process, oversight, and accountability legs it needs to make its legitimacy permanent.  But institutional settlement, stability of the framework over time and administrations of different parties, matters hugely.

Certainly I hope the President’s speech tomorrow reaches out to address the needs of institutional settlement.  And I very much hope that Congress, and Congressional Republicans especially, take up the opportunity to find ways to engage legislatively – legislating as if there might be both Republicans and Democrats in the presidency.

(And thanks to John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, for getting this June article up early in advance of the President’s speech, and for making it available free to non-subscribers.  Plus, for anyone interested, at this moment it looks as though I’ll be part of a roundtable commenting on the speech on To the Point on NPR tomorrow afternoon.)

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), member of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, plans to introduce a bill that would increase Congressional oversight over kill-capture operations conducted outside of Afghanistan by the US military.  University of Texas law professor Robert Chesney discusses the proposed legislation over at Lawfare, and gives a section by section commentary.  Whether this is an important step or not depends on one’s starting point, of course; I agree with Chesney that it is a big deal and a welcome step to regularizing . (Though if one’s view is that all these operations are unlawful, or that  they require judicial oversight, or something else, whether from the Left of the Democratic Party or what we might call the Pauline wing of the Republican Party, then you won’t be much moved.)

Seen within the framework of US law and oversight of overseas use of force operations, this is an important step.  A couple of observations.  First, this (soon-to-be) proposed legislation is with respect to operations conducted by the US military under US Code Title 10; it does not cover CIA activities, which are already subject to oversight and reporting under US Code Title 50.  Second, it covers US military operations with respect to the lines of oversight running back to the Armed Services committees; essentially it increases the role of the Armed Services committees in oversight of US military operations in what it defines as “Sensitive Military Operations” – which in practice means clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) activities.  It does not alter the existing oversight processes of Congressional intelligence committees governing covert action as defined in US Code Title 50, but extends and increases oversight over military operations.  Why this focus on military operations conducted by JSOC?

Counterintuitive as many might find it, the CIA is subject to far greater oversight, and at a far higher level of government, in its conduct of Title 50 covert activities than the US military is in its conduct of armed operations under Title 10.  There are good reasons why the military is not subject to direct oversight in essentially tactical decision-making in its traditional military activities once a decision has been made to commit to the use of force.  These decisions have long been understood to be within the discretion and responsibility of commanders who have the expertise to carry them out.  Oversight through the Armed Services committees is robust, including its closed sessions, but is not considered the same as that which Title 50 requires for covert activities because the kinds of activities traditionally conceived – conventional conflict versus covert activities – were different.  However, the expansion of the US military into clandestine activities – which might or might not meet the legal definition of “covert” under Title 50 and so trigger those oversight functions – has raised new questions as to whether the Armed Services committees’ oversight, traditionally conceived for conventional conflicts, keeps Congress sufficiently informed and permits sufficiently timely oversight in the case of activities carried out by JSOC.

[Added: Chesney has amended his original post to emphasize that in practice JSOC operations receive an op-by-op review by the Armed Services committees; he points to this Craig Whitlock article in the Washington Post.  I am quite prepared to believe this, but agree with Bobby that the formalization of this process in law remains just as important as ever. The problem of "institutional settlement" in US counterterrorism policy, discussed at the bottom of this post, is in large part taking jury-rigged and ad hoc processes, in order to both make them permanent features of the national security toolkit and to regularize and institutionalize them.]

Whether there is sufficient oversight depends partly on whether you think that oversight by the Intelligence committees is sufficient, or whether, in the case of US military operations through JSOC, the Armed Services committees ought to be more involved irrespective of what happens in the Intelligence committees.  My strong impression is that members of the Armed Services committees, on both sides of the aisle, believe that there needs to be a stronger role for those committees; this bill is partly a response to that concern.  This is reinforced by a further feature of the existing legislative structure for oversight.  Title 50 defines covert activities, but then exempts from the definition “traditional” military activities as well as activities done in routine support of others’ (e.g., CIA) activities.

This suggests – at least as a structural possibility – that important JSOC operations might be carried out on an internal legal view that they do not constitute “covert” activities because they are “traditional” military activities, and therefore do not trigger Title 50 oversight.  As military activities, oversight would take place through the Armed Services committees, but only in the relatively limited way that now exists.  One result of Rep. Thornberry’s proposed reforms would be essentially to close that structural gap. It does so by requiring oversight through the Armed Services committees for any “Sensitive Military Operation” carried out by the military, without regard to any other obligations under Title 50 covert activities.  Among its specifics, it requires reporting on the process and criteria for targeting decisions – the so-called “kill list” committees and “disposition matrix.”

This seems to me a very good idea.  I need to think through other parts of the proposed legislation to be sure I understand the implications, but as a general proposition, I’ve long believed that “institutional settlement” of the permanent structure of US “counterterrorism-on-offense,” as I’ve sometimes termed it, requires important reforms and updating of the legislative structure of oversight in order to take account of the realities of targeted killing, drone warfare, and other forms of highly targeted use of force, as well as the expansion of JSOC and its capabilities.  This proposed legislation is a first, and welcome, step toward getting Congress directly involved in that reform process.  Congress needs to be directly involved in updating the machinery of covert and clandestine operations – more precisely, in delineating the range of activities that involve discrete, intelligence-driven uses of force that carry hostilities directly to terrorism targets – and the oversight processes.  The administration ought to work with Congress to do that.  It is an area that – unlike many others, such as Guantanamo, what happened and why at Benghazi, etc. – ought to permit for a lot of bipartisan agreement.  Here is Chesney’s bottom line:

What’s not to like?  I have long had concerns with respect to whether there was adequate operation-by-operation transparency vis-à-vis Congress when it came to JSOC direct action outside of Afghanistan.  This legislation speaks directly and clearly to that concern, while also moving the ball forward at least a bit in terms of forcing the executive branch to explain to the armed services committees the legal and policy elements that govern its decisions regarding the designation of individuals or groups as objects of direct action.  The Obama administration should get behind this, not resist it—especially if it is inclined to shift some or all of the CIA’s kinetic portfolio over to JSOC.

This is not, as regular readers will know, an unstated attempt on my part to kill off these programs by process reforms.  It is instead endorsement of attempts to “discipline” them – as Harold Koh put it in his Oxford Union speech a few days ago – and put them on a footing of institutional permanence, so that these tools join the permanent repertoire of national security available to presidents into the future.  That requires a process of oversight by the political branches more attuned to the realities of how covert and clandestine uses of force are likely to unfold than existing statutes do today.  As it happens, Benjamin Wittes and I are co-authoring a new book that addresses the terms of institutional settlement in counterterrorism, based in an analysis and reconstruction of speeches by senior Obama officials and agency general counsels on national security (we’re putting it out chapter by chapter online, and Hoover Press will put out a hardback once completed).

John Villasenor – a professor of engineering at UCLA and a Brookings Institution senior fellow – has a new article at Slate on the domestic use of drones.  (The article part of a conference held yesterday at the New America Foundation in conjunction with Arizona State University on domestic drone policy, with many fine participants; well worth checking out.)  The article’s fundamental point is that many features that will likely figure in FAA regulations intended to ensure safety in domestic airspace as drones are allowed to enter it will also be supportive of privacy concerns.  By no means does this make the problems of privacy go away, but it’s important to be aware of the ways in which safety regulation will affect and, in important ways, reinforce privacy.

Self-driving cars are receiving a lot of attention these days – partly as the technologies that make them possible advance and partly because, well, we the public are more aware of them and are realizing there is quite a lot to discuss regarding their regulation and use.  As the technologies that appear to be making self-driving cars possible advance from the science fiction to the hypothetical to the possible to the likely, technological paths become sufficiently determinate that it makes sense to be talking about the social, legal, and regulatory structures for their use.

Indeed, we are probably a little late in holding these discussions, because knowledge of the social and regulatory conditions can, and does, have an influence on the technological designs, and so generally, the earlier the better.  A new and quite interesting debate at the Economist asks the question, whether and how soon these cars will be ready for market (it’s not a debate over whether they are desirable, but instead whether they will be feasible in the foreseeable future). It’s striking that the pro-side (holding that they will be, and sooner rather than later) essentially rests on technological feasibility, while the con side rests partly on skepticism about the technologies but very considerably on whether the social, economic, legal and regulatory hurdles will have been overcome.

Self-driving cars are special for a couple of reasons.  One is that they will (and already do) consist of a bundle of technologies – in one sense conceived in the usual robotics formulation of sensors, computation, and physical movement.  But in the case of cars, it’s better understood as automation of the distinct systems of a car: acceleration, braking, steering, etc.  These are being automated in separate systems, and combined together in the computer control of the total vehicle.

A second feature about autonomous cars arises from the this “bundling” feature.  Automation, leading eventually to genuinely autonomous driving, is coming about gradually, as these systems are gradually introduced to new versions of vehicles.  It’s both gradual for automation of the vehicle as a whole, but it’s also the introduction of this bit of the bundle of technologies or that bit, rather than every piece at once.  At the top end of the luxury car range, mostly, you can buy a car that is gradually incorporating more and more of these systems and capabilities.  It happens gradually and is introduced in the marketing not as self-driving, which would be both untrue at this stage and also a huge flag for litigation, but instead as giving the human driver greater safety and convenience.  The automation is somewhat like an advanced form of cruise control – still entirely in the hands of the human driver – except that it gradually gets more and more advanced as in the case, for example, of being able to hold an approximate speed while still maintaining a safe distance to the car ahead and slowing appropriately.  In the case of steering – the ability to parallel park, for example, which is a headache in tight urban spaces for many people (me included), but amenable to machines because, at bottom, this is a matter of calculation and geometry, not interaction with other moving vehicles, provided that the car has sufficiently good sensors and steering control to do what the computer is able to calculate.

These kinds of features can be introduced to lines of vehicles – presumably to start out at the most expensive cars and gradually be introduced down the food chain – without the idea that any particular level of automation requires that the car be autonomous.  It’s gradual – incremental increases in the automation of separate systems until, finally, taken together, the car is able to drive itself. This final step of autonomy presumably requires complex integration of all these systems, as well as much additional programming for how certain decisions will be made by the vehicle, but the systems fundamental to the car moving as a physical vehicle will already have been automated by that point.

A third feature is that the idea is that they will be introduced as individual self-driving units into a more general ecosystem of cars that might also be autonomous, but more likely, at least at first, will be driven by human beings.  This sharply distinguishes the combined social and technological model from centralized transportation systems that contemplate a central computerized control of all the vehicles.  Many people – me included – would have imagined that self-driving cars could only work as part of a centralized grid controlling all vehicles at once, but the trajectory of the technologies involved is to try and find a way to allow autonomously driving vehicles to be able to operate among human-driven cars.  This requires certain capabilities of the technologies involved, of course, and it is not wholly certain that they will get there any time soon, to the point that one could go beyond Google’s test cars – which, note, operate on roads already mapped in enormous detail by Google engineers – to a general self-driving car capable of driving among human drivers.  Still, it is remarkable how far Google cars have come and how fast.

Given the speed with which the technologies are taking off, then, the social, economic, legal, and regulatory questions require answers.  Automobiles are very special, after all – driving is a complex social activity, a highly structured social activity featuring many formal rules and standards as well as many informal ones.  For most of us, it is the most trusting activity we engage in – trusting to other drivers to behave as expected in a multitude of formal and informal ways – and this in a social space that is remarkable both for its “natural” features (the law of inertia comes to mind) and its entirely artificial and socially constructed features (red means stop). The answers are not yet there – not really.  In one sense, all the necessary fields of law are in place, such as products liability, insurance law and markets, driving laws, etc.  But even if there is no new “law of robots” to be introduced, the answers are not yet in place, specific to these emerging technologies.

This was discussed in several very interesting sessions at the (fabulous – thank you, Ryan Calo and Michael Froomkin among others!) We Robots 2013 conference a few weeks ago at Stanford Law School (there is video as well as the draft papers presented at the link).  Bryant Walker Smith, an automative engineer and lawyer (and fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society), and Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law, walked through some of the issues related to vehicle and driving codes.  Smith released last November, through CSIS, a terrific report on the driving laws of the 50 states plus international driving law (who knew there’s a Geneva Convention on driving law, aimed at standardizing some basic things like red and green?) that shows both that there is probably room for self-driving vehicles under the laws of many states, but that there are equally many ambiguities and questions – any of which might lead to legal headaches if litigated in accidents.  The liability issue is under discussion in many quarters, of course, such as the special 2012 law review symposium of the Santa Clara University School of Law (which, given its location, has carved out an important role in these emerging technologies) on legal issues related to driverless cars.

One important feature of the discussion over liability and insurance bears mentioning.  As writers such as Megan McArdle have correctly noted, the practical outcome in the existing tort system will likely be “functional” strict liability for the machine’s manufacturer or programmer or both in case of accidents.  This was noted as well at the We Robot 2013 conference. The resulting liability awards might be sufficient to deter the technology – even if overall the effect of many people using self-driving cars resulted in much safer roads.  This worries Google; one engineer remarked at the We Robots that Detroit car companies might have introduced various parts of these self-driving technologies, but thought about the liability issues and thought again.  A recent article in the Economist points to several possible solutions – each of which, however, essentially shifts liability off of the manufacturer or programmer of the vehicle and raises serious questions about who bears the costs and benefits of driverless cars, and what would be efficient or fair:

A study in 2009 of the legal risks of increasingly autonomous cars by the RAND Corporation, a research body, suggested two possible solutions: changing the liability laws to require courts to take the benefits of driverless technology into account when punishing carmakers for any failings; and limiting motorists’ ability to sue in state courts when driverless technology mandated by federal laws fails to prevent an accident.

(And: thanks to Instapundit for linking to the new policy essay by Matthew Waxman and me from the Hoover Institution, referenced at the end of this post, Law and Ethics for Autonomous Weapon Systems – thanks Glenn!)

Last November, two documents appeared within a few days of each other, each addressing the emerging legal and policy issues of autonomous weapon systems – and taking strongly incompatible, indeed opposite, approaches.  One was from Human Rights Watch, whose report, Losing Our Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots, made a sweeping, preemptive, provocative call for an international treaty ban on the use, production, and development of what it defined as “fully autonomous weapons” and dubbed “Killer Robots.”  Human Rights Watch has followed that up with a public campaign for signatures on a petition supporting a ban, as well as a number of publicity initiatives that (I think I can say pretty neutrally) seem as much drawn from sci-fi and pop culture as anything.  It plans to launch this global campaign at an event at the House of Commons in London later in April.

The other was the Department of Defense Directive, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems” (3000.09, November 21, 2012).  The Directive establishes DOD policy and “assigns responsibilities for the development and use of autonomous and semi-autonomous functions in weapon systems … [and] establishes guidelines designed to minimize the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems.”

By contrast to the sweeping, preemptive treaty ban approach embraced by HRW, the DOD Directive calls for a review and regulatory process – in part an administrative expansion of the existing legal weapons review process within DOD, but reaching back to the very beginning of the research and development process.  In part it aims to ensure that whatever level of autonomy a weapon system might have, and in whatever component, the autonomous function is intentional and not inadvertent, and has been subjected to design, operational, and legal review to ensure that it both complies with the laws of war in the operational environment for which it is intended – and will actually work in that operational environment as advertised.  (The DOD Directive is not very long, and makes the most sense, if you are looking for an introduction into DOD’s conceptual approach, read against the background of a briefing paper issued earlier, in July 2012, by DOD’s Defense Science Board, The Role of Autonomy in DOD Systems.)

In essence, HRW seeks to ban autonomous weapon systems, rooting a ban on autonomous lethal targeting by machine per se in its interpretation of existing IHL, while calling for new affirmative treaty law specifically to codify it. By contrast, DOD adopts a regulatory approach grounded in existing processes and law of weapons and weapons reviews.  Michael Schmitt and Jeffrey Thurnher offer the basic legal position underlying DOD’s approach in a new article forthcoming in Harvard National Security Journal, “‘Out of the Loop’: Autonomous Weapon Systems and the Law of Armed Conflict.” They say that autonomous weapon systems are not per se illegal under the law of weapons, and that their legality or restriction on their lawful use in any particular operational environment depends upon the usual principles of targeting law. There will be machine systems that will never be lawful for use in some operational environments or even in any operational environment – but maybe some that will.

II

I think Schmitt and Thurnher have it right as a legal matter – and quite clearly so – but there are important dissenting voices.  A different view is offered by University of Miami’s Markus Wagner in, for example,“Autonomy in the Battlespace: Independently Operating Weapon Systems and the Law of Armed Conflict” (chapter in International Humanitarian Law and the Changing Technology of War, 2012).   New School for Social Research professor Peter Asaro has offered a reading of Protocol I and other laws of armed conflict treaties aiming to show that human beings are assumed to be present as moral agents engaged in targeting in these texts (forthcoming special section of the International Review of the Red Cross). Asaro is careful to hold out only that this interpretation is implicit, rather than explicit – a thoughtful and creative reading, though not finally one that persuades the hard-hearted lex lata lawyer in me.  (Asaro is not a lawyer, but a “philosopher of technology,” thus establishing himself as having the Coolest of Jobs, and also co-founder of an organization that has been calling for a ban for several years; Peter and I have cordially disagreed at several academic discussions, most recently at the outstanding WeRobot 2013 conference at Stanford Law School earlier this week.)

A debate over autonomous weapon systems is thus underway in academic law and policy – and in the Real World.  It promises to heat up considerably. Much of the debate (as Peter’s and my exchange at the WeRobot 2013 conference suggests) goes to what one believes is the bedrock moral principle (and which, if true, ought to be embraced as law) for targeting and weapons.  Is it per se immoral for a human being ever to be targeted autonomously by a machine that (as “full autonomy” is defined by DOD) has no human being “in” or “on” the loop, either in target selection or engagement with the target?  Is a human being essential to those two actions – target selection and target engagement – and is the absence of a human being fatal to its morality, irrespective of how good or how bad the machine does at targeting only what it ought to and minimizing collateral harms? Peter takes the position that the human being is essential; my position is that the bottom-level moral principle at issue here is not whether it is a human or not a human, but whether whatever does the targeting is able to comply with the requirements of the laws of war.  The “package” is simple an incident of nature, contingent, and not morally controlling.

Peter’s position, not mine, is the one taken by a number of very smart ethicists and philosophers, including, for example, Wendell Wallach, who describes a machine taking such a lethal decision “mala in se.“ University of Sheffield computer science professor Noel Sharkey (the well-known public commentator on these issues, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of friendly disagreement before and no doubt will again) also takes this position, though he also takes others that are factual in nature.  But on this moral argument, the requirement of a human being is the end of the moral chain, so to speak.  I don’t agree with it, but I understand the arguments driving it.  HRW’s report, by contrast, launches into quite a different kind of argument, and a much more problematic one.  Though it appears to accept the buck-stopping moral position, it also and mostly argues strenuously for two factual claims.

The first is that, no matter how much time goes by, as a matter of fact, machine intelligence will never be adequate to the moral decision-making that lethal targeting requires.  To which, of course, the proper response is, fifty years?  A hundred years? Two hundred years?  Maybe HRW is right.  But how does it know and what gives being a human rights monitor any special ability to see the future of technology – and tell us what to ban and not ban today, in order to ensure that a future that it purports to see does not come about?  Not all of us are quite as certain about where technology might go and what it might yield – and we are quite unwilling, on HRW’s say-so, to give up the possible future social gains (including reducing harm on the battlefield) that such technologies might produce along the way because HRW foresees a future somewhere between a Philip K. Dick novel and Terminator.  (Or as a friend put it, knowing Ken co-blogs with Ilya, “So who sailed from the Grey Havens and gave HRW a palantir? -ed.)

The second is that, no matter what technological developments take place, machines could never offer the affective and emotional qualities that targeting decisions in war do and properly should require on the battlefield – sympathy, empathy, compassion. Again, this is a factual claim about the future of machine intelligence – a prediction extending into the future, forever – that leaves one to ask, how does HRW claim to know any such thing?  And it’s a particularly peculiar claim coming from a human rights monitor whose bread and butter in armed conflict reporting not infrequently involves things soldiers did on the battlefield because of fear, desire for vengeance, simple bad judgment from cold and hunger, and the limits of human cognition in the fog of war – a conspicuous, yet all-too-human, absence of empathy and compassion.  One wonders why HRW didn’t just as easily focus on those less praise-worthy human emotions and at least entertain the possibility that a machine that has no emotions either way, but which might be programmed to behave in ways that respect the humanity of non-combatants and, further, might be programmed to simply sacrifice itself in order to spare non-combatants, might after all said and done be a very good thing.

III

In conversations with HRW, I’ve been told, and encouraged to note publicly, that it does not want its report and call for a ban to be understood in extreme ways.  I’m happy to do that, with one caveat.  So, for example, it does not mean everything one might read its call for a ban on “development” of fully autonomous weapons to say.  It also appears to want to find a way not to be interpreted as declaring the future history of technology, though that appears more difficult, given the language of the report.  My (genuine) advice to HRW on this point (though not my view, of course) is to say that it’s not predicting where technology will and won’t go, as a matter of necessity.  Instead, it’s saying that, in its judgment, it is overwhelmingly likely that all these bad scenarios would emerge over the long run – and that these scenarios are sufficiently bad to justify banning all these many things today. Continue reading ‘The Debate About to Heat Up Over HRW’s Call to Ban “Killer Robots,” AKA Autonomous Weapon Systems’ »

The Wall Street Journal national security reporting team has a new article in today’s Journal on how US surveillance drones are providing intelligence and targeting information to French forces in Mali, which then use the information to direct French (manned) airstrikes.  The drone surveillance marks, according to the article, a widened role for the US in support of French military operations in Mali:

U.S. Reaper drones have provided intelligence and targeting information that have led to nearly 60 French airstrikes in the past week alone in a range of mountains the size of Britain, where Western intelligence agencies believe militant leaders are hiding, say French officials.

The operations target top militants, including Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the mastermind of January’s hostage raid on an Algerian natural gas plant that claimed the lives of at least 38 employees, including three Americans. Chad forces said they killed him on Saturday, a day after saying they had killed Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, the commander of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s Mali wing.

French, U.S. and Malian officials have not confirmed the deaths of Mr. Belmokhtar or Mr. Zeid, citing a lack of definitive information from the field. But they say the new arrangement with the U.S. has led in recent days to a raised tempo in strikes against al Qaeda-linked groups and their allies some time after the offensive began in January. That is a shift for the U.S., which initially limited intelligence sharing that could pinpoint targets for French strikes.

The lack of French drone capacity, for surveillance or attack, was noted in a New York Times article two weeks ago that profiled the French Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian.  Le Drian was blunt about the need for and the lack of drones (emphasis added below):

[W]hile the French express hope that African forces will pursue the Islamists into the mountains and deserts of the vast north, it is highly likely that French special forces will have to continue to operate on their own and alongside the Africans, with the help of American surveillance drones.

One of the most shocking lessons for him from Mali, Mr. Le Drian said, was the lack of French surveillance drones, which he called “incomprehensible.” France has only two drones in theater, he said. “A country with aeronautical skills, that makes good airplanes and that did not anticipate what surveillance and intelligence will look like tomorrow — or even combat!” he said. France “did not anticipate and refused to make this choice — but this doesn’t date from today but from 5 or 10 years ago. I have asked that someone explain the story to me so I understand why we didn’t do it, since, really, we should have.”

Perhaps the problem was national pride and a refusal to buy American? “I’m trying to remedy this impasse and this pride,” he said. “It’s a real question for us.”

Le Derian says that this dates back five or ten years.  No doubt that is true, but I wonder whether part of the problem in the last few years, especially, has been the increasingly vocal anti-drone campaigners and their impact upon national parliaments in Europe.  The anti-drone campaign has done a lot to create a stigma in Europe around drones, whether for surveillance or strikes.  It paints them as anything from a coward’s weapon – the “you refuse to fight your enemy man-to-man, mano-a-mano” meme, ignoring the fact though most of modern weaponry promotes remoteness, whether firing a cruise missile from the bowels of a ship, or firing an artillery shell from many kilometers away – to Skynet, a universal brooding presence watching everything.

II

The reality is a lot more prosaic, of course.  Drones require an airstrip, refueling and repair facilities, a sizable human team, just to keep them in the air, and all of that in-theater – piloting it from Nevada changes none of that. But the prosaic reality doesn’t count much, so far as I can tell, against predictions of the dystopian technological future drawn from a 1991 movie starring Arnold.  Sci fi pop culture is an easier narrative for public consumption than the much less interesting facts of how automation is gradually entering into the machines of war, as part of the process by which it is entering many technologies, military or civilian.  The problem is that all of us enjoy the pop culture references – me and you and everyone else – but we have passed the point at which we can rely for envisioning the future on Philip K. Dick novels.  There are actual technologies underway, with actual directions for future technologies, paths that open some possibilities and close others.  Those interested in serious discussions about where technology will and should go need to separate the “fun” moments of Terminator this and Skynet that from the real discussions of what real technologies are underway.    Continue reading ‘US Surveillance Drones Aid French Airstrikes in Mali’ »

Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who studies human- robot psychological and social interactions.  She has been documenting and studying the attitudes of humans toward having emotional relationships and affective interactions with robots over time, and notes a gradual shift toward seeing such interactions favorably.  She recently presented at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings; it was covered by LiveScience (Clara Moskowitz, Human Robot Relations: Why We Should Worry, LifeScience 18 February 2013, HT Insta).  LiveScience is a popularizer of science, of course, and Turkle’s academic research is sober and restrained, and much more sophisticated than a general interest site can easily convey, but the article captures well some important points.  First, attitudes are in fact shifting in the United States:

Turkle studies people’s thoughts and feelings about robots, and has found a culture shift over time. Where subjects in her studies used to say, in the 1980s and ’90s, that love and friendship are connections that can occur only between humans, people now often say robots could fill these roles ...

Turkle interviewed a teenage boy in 1983, asking him whom he would turn to, to talk about dating problems. The boy said he would talk to his dad, but wouldn’t consider talking to a robot, because machines could never truly understand human relationships.  In 2008, Turkle interviewed another boy of the same age, from the same neighborhood as the first. This time, the boy said he would prefer to talk to a robot, which could be programmed with a large database of knowledge about relationship patterns, rather than talk to his dad, who might give bad advice.

Turkle is particularly well-known within the specialist community, however, for her concern that increasingly positive feelings toward machines as companions and replacements for human interaction is not a good thing over time.  She worries (as she said at the AAAS meeting) that humans might come to see machines as the perfect and safe companions – seen as preferable to fallible and much more complicated actual human beings:

Turkle worries about this drive to replace human caretakers with robots. “Its not just that older people are supposed to be talking. Younger people are supposed to be listening,” she said. “We are showing very little interest in what our elders have to say. We are building the machines that will literally let their stories fall on deaf ears.”

Children, in turn, play with more and more robotic and electronic toys. Many, like the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 1990s, and the later robotic dog Aibo, require nurturing, which encourages kids to take care of them, and therefore, to care about them. Some kids say they prefer these pets to real dogs and cats that can grow old and die.  ”People used to buy pets to teach their children about life and death and loss,” Turkle said. We are now teaching kids that real living creatures are risky, while robots are safe.

Turkle’s worries are important, and I would go further to worry that, over time, we might be building a culture and society that rewards those who interact best with machines and worst with humans.  That recognized, however, it’s also important not to sentimentalize human interactions in settings in which the machine might turn out to do a much, much better job.

In the case of elder-care robots, for example, dealing with people with serious dementia or Alzheimers – who might ask the same question over and over again, for example – a cuddly robot that can be programmed to give responses patiently, without getting frustrated or angry, is a blessing, not a curse.  There’s no reason that it can’t be programmed to give the clinically best form of response – e.g., responding a number of times, but then gently seeking to shift the conversation away and out of the loop.

These are in matters where the emotional connection is comforting precisely because it is safe, secure, dependable for an elderly, confused person.  There are other kinds of robots that (certainly I hope) will be developed for elder care or nursing facilities that are not supposed to develop emotional ties – machines intended to free up nurses for more complex tasks that require human skill, judgment, emotions and capacities.  For example, many elderly people would likely prefer a machine – one that is purely an “appliance” – to help them with intimate functions such as toilet-care.  The point of a machine in that case is that it is an extension of you and a projection of one’s own independence; one is not looking for “humanity” here.  What matters is that the machine performs well, is reliable, etc. – but it intended to be thought of as an appliance.

In some respects, then, certain aspects of robots that can make them emotionally most helpful to people with serious illnesses such as dementia or Alzheimers are precisely the ones that make them perhaps harmful in excess to ordinary people without those difficulties, in the ways Turkle identifies.  In  my next posts, I want to take up two related robot-human interaction issues.  One is robot sex; the assumption has always been that human sex will find a way and that robot sex will always be the vinyl blow-up sex doll.  Whereas technological advances and Turkle’s insights might suggest this will not always be so.  The other is a more prosaic question about human attentiveness and self-driving cars.  Stay tuned.

In a Hoover Institution essay a few weeks ago, the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes asked, “How long do we really think it will take before a gun enthusiast arms a remotely-piloted robotic aircraft with his favorite handgun (very doable by a competent layperson with a few thousand dollars to burn)?” He points at Lawfare today to a new YouTube video of a hobbyist who has mounted a paintball gun on a hobbyist drone.  The paintball gun is impressively accurate, all things considered.  I leave to Dave Kopel and other gun law experts here the legal ins and outs of whether an actual handgun mounted on a drone; my uninformed assumption is that it is illegal, indeed criminal, now; the YouTube video says repeatedly that a real weapon would illegal. I’m  not a legal expert in this area (on Gun Appreciation Day, following Dave Kopel’s suggestion to consider supporting Second Amendment groups, I re-joined the NRA after several years of lapse from sheer inattention, but I don’t follow this area save international law issues such as the proposed arms treaty).  However, I learned of this video from former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey, at a conference that looked at what it called the gradual proliferation of “many-to-many threats,” including cyber, bio-weaponization, and certain aspects of robotics and autonomous robotic systems.  “If this is what a novice with a small budget can accomplish,” the voiceover narrator says with understated ambiguity, “then clearly, this technology has a lot of potential.” Actually,from the standpoint of the individual gun-owner whose interest is self-defense, my guess is that this technology is pretty limited in its application, unless there were a considerable amount of automation introduced into the technology. It might be useful to home defense, I suppose, to send a drone rather than sending yourself, but it might turn out to be more useful to several attackers, one of whom controls a drone that comes at an individual gun-carrier from several directions. A lot in that case depends on where the automation of the system might go. Given all those contingencies, I think it will be peripheral at most to self-defense and almost certainly illegal.

VC readers, being eclectic polymaths, are likely to heard of the “Uncanny Valley” – the hypothesis advanced by roboticist Masahiro Mori that a ”person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley.” Mori’s article appeared more than 40 years in an obscure journal in Japan called Energy, but was never widely available in complete form in English.  Last year, Automaton, IEEE/Spectrum’s robotics blog, published a complete translation of the article.  I had never read it in full, and I thought it might interest VC readers.  The notion of the Uncanny Valley has taken on greater importance as robots are gradually being developed that are intended to have greater human-machine interaction.  And the article is important in its own right as part of the intellectual history of science and technology.  Here is the editor’s introduction, from which the above quote is taken:

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal calledEnergy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention. More recently, however, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human-robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, while others have investigated its biological and social roots. Now interest in the uncanny valley should only intensify, as technology evolves and researchers build robots that look increasingly human. Though copies of Mori’s essay have circulated among researchers, a complete version hasn’t been widely available. This is the first publication of an English translation that has been authorized and reviewed by Mori.

The “Law and Robotics Conference” will take place on April 8-9, 2013, at Stanford Law School (it follows on the highly successful law and robotics conference that took place at University of Miami last year).  Conference organizers are seeking proposals to present conference papers – I should have posted this a while ago – and paper proposals are due by this Friday, January 18.  Matthew Waxman and I plan to submit a proposal on comparing self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems (I’ve been exploring some of these ideas, brainstorming for the paper, here at Volokh), and I am 100% certain the conference will be terrific with outstanding papers and great discussions.  Here is the link if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, over at Lawfare, Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski, Benjamin Wittes, Matthew Waxman, and I have been debating the recent HRW report calling for a ban on “Killer Robots.”  Tom’s latest response – though mostly a serious discussion, well worth reading though it does not succeed in persuading me – has a video at the end that I will always, always fondly treasure.  It’s great.   (It’s in Hindi, and though I didn’t know Tom knew Hindi, I’m going to trust his subtitles.)

In my earlier posts comparing self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems, I pointed out that in neither case are we seeing a sudden, systemic paradigm change, a shift from one whole technological system to another.  Not, at least, in the sense that I had long assumed – that a change-over to driverless cars would require necessarily a systemic change from individuals driving their individual cars to a centralized computer system dealing with all the vehicles in the system as a whole system – including things like sensors in the roads, no commingling of system-controlled cars with individually-controlled cars, etc.

Instead, the changes in these particular technologies are occurring incrementally.  It might be different for other technologies, but for these, it so happens that the changes are taking place bit by bit.  Cars are being sold one-by-one that are gradually incorporating more and more of these automatic systems, as safety and convenience features.  This fact alters the nature of the legal, ethical, and policy review that has to be made of the systems – regulatory review, too, has to be incremental.  Moreover, changes toward automation often occur in highly discrete technological functions within the larger activity – braking systems in cars, or the detailed and particular criteria used for target identification in weapons, for example.  Legal, ethical, and policy decisions have to address both the particular function and its impact on the overall machine system.  In this regard, I once again highly recommend the new report by Bryant Walker Smith (Stanford Center for Internet and Society), on the legality of self-driving cars in the US. For those of us interested in weapon systems, it provides a useful basis for comparing ways in which vehicle codes will have to gradually take account of evolutionary technologies with what the legal review for automating weapon systems has to be.

Still, vehicles and weapons are different for many reasons – starting with the intentions behind their uses as technology.  Vehicles are not intended to be violent; weapons are – intentionally potentially violent and often lethal.  But what does that difference in intention finally net us?  The machine itself doesn’t have an “intention” as a human being does; it has its programming.  The problem of the programmer is to mimic that human intention in the machine’s behaviors.  We might refer to this as a “Ethical Turing Test” – behind the veil, so to speak, can we distinguish between the behaviors of the intentionally ethical human and the “behaviorally” (i.e., programmed) ethical robot?  I don’t know (with respect to either vehicles or weapons) whether, to what extent, or in what particular activities machines might surpass humans on the “Ethical Turing Test.” That will only be answered by the progress of technology.  But technology has made remarkable advances up to this point – I would not have guessed how quickly self-driving vehicles would be emerging, for example, and I would not have guessed that it would be possible to create the technology without a complete technological paradigm shift.

The benefits from these innovations might well be so great that we would make a tragic mistake not to explore them, irrespective of whether or how close they get to ethical adequacy, and that’s as true of weapons systems as it is of self-driving cars.  Contra Human Rights Watch’s recent, problematic report (remarkably unconsidered for a HRW report and, to be blunt, simply unserious) calling for a preemptive international ban on autonomous weapon systems or any research and development that could lead to such a system, this is true of weapon systems.  Not to undertake the research and development into how automation can increase precision and discrimination, finally lessening the harms of war – particularly when highly relevant and similar development is already proceeding in such areas as vehicles – entails a potentially steep and tragic opportunity cost.  What might be given up by adhering to HRW’s quite irresponsible call to ban even such research and development seems to me profoundly wrong to give up – indeed immoral.  We owe it to future generations to seek to use the same technologies that we might find will gradually, incrementally protect human life in activities from driving to surgery to the care of the elderly – all technologies that will involve machine decisions about potentially lethal actions – to decrease the harms of war.  It’s frankly inconceivable to me, in any case, that future generations accustomed to automation in the name of superior safety in all these other areas of human activity, if that’s what the new technologies succeed in bringing about, would not simply presume as a matter of course that they would be applied as feasible in weapons and conflict.

What does seem important in comparing vehicles and weapons, then, is that at the granular level, though they differ in the intentions behind their use, each inevitably involves decisions implying the possibility of violence and even lethality.  Yes, it matters ethically and legally that a weapon is intended to have lethal application, whereas the technologies of self-driving cars are intended to avoid violence and lethality.  But at the granular level of the actions that the technologies take, they are programmed to make decisions and initiate actions that might well still cause violence directly, or collaterally, or by error.  As Gary Marcus pointed out in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, even vehicular automation technologies will one day (not so long from now) have to start grappling with programming decisions about whether to risk the driver in order to spare, say, the school bus full of children; that is an intentional decision about life and death made by a human programmer and written into a machine.  And that decision will likely be part of a system beyond human intervention, at least at the speed with which it will be made in a real life possible crash.

Moreover, as far as “humans in the decision loop” is concerned, the automotive technology already overrides human actions in some narrow yet crucial matters – anti-lock brakes, for example, exist to prevent and override a systemically predictable but wrong human response, at least among most drivers.  In one sense, anti-lock brakes carry out the highest level human intention – stopping the car – but at the granular level they override the immediate human intentional action in braking.  But the technology does so at the level of one crucial, yet relatively small, part of driving the car; a self-driving car is thus actually better understood as a whole bunch of particular systems and functions in the car, which, in a completely self-driving vehicle, must all come together – braking, steering, acceleration, etc. The automation of the vehicle has to address each of them, and all of them together.

The same is true of complex weapon systems. They are bundles of particular systems and functions forming a larger whole.  Permitting or not permitting automation has to take the unbundled bits on their own; next as a whole system; and finally as one weapon system in relation to other military systems with which it might interact, sometimes in unexpected and unintended ways.  This is, by the way, the approach taken by the best practice policy in this area, the recent Department of Defense Directive on Autonomous Weapon Systems, which requires legal and policy evaluation of any autonomous or semi-autonomous weapon system on a basis integrating incremental review of the system parts throughout the development process, review of the system as a whole, and finally review of its interaction with other military systems.

(In my next post on this topic, I query framing real life robot debates in terms of pop culture.)

I’m continuing my series of posts on automated vehicles (the last one was some initial thoughts on comparisons between self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems).  Today I want to recommend this January 12, 2013 NYT story, by John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, on the current state of safety systems for cars in the incremental advance toward fully automated and finally self-driving vehicles.  Plus, in order to understand the regulatory and legal context in which this transformation necessarily takes place, I also highly recommend the new report by Bryant Walker Smith (Stanford Center for Internet and Society), on the legality of self-driving cars in the US. It makes a useful basis for comparing the ways in which vehicle codes will have to gradually take account of evolutionary technologies.

New York State, for example, requires in its vehicle code that drivers have one hand on the steering wheel at all times; that obviously won’t be compatible with the emergence of self-driving cars. Even Nevada (a state that has positioned itself ahead of the curve by adopting a self-driving car provision) requires that the car have a human driver who is responsible and able to take over driving.  Texting while the car drives itself is okay, in other words, but getting into the vehicle drunk and telling it to drive you home is not, because you would not be able to drive if necessary.  Yet technology will presumably alter that, and the vehicle code will presumably adapt as the technology improves, given that a core purpose of self-driving vehicles is to drive people who are incapacitated, by alcohol, but more importantly by age.  After all, Google is betting its self-driving cars on a market among elderly baby boomers who can’t (or shouldn’t) be driving.

Which goes to illustrate that a key focus and market for robotics in America will be, one way or another, the elderly.  It isn’t necessarily about Robbie the Robot – or Awesom-O, if you prefer – your robot friend and servant.  As Gary Marcus points out in another useful New Yorker column, “Why Making Robots Is So Darn Hard,” there are important reasons why personal or genuinely useful consumer robotics is so much harder than, say, robots on the industrial workshop floor.  But robots will increasingly feature further back in the supply chain of, for example, elder-care.  Amazon’s genius in no small part consists of convincing aging boomers like me that we’re cool and hip and not old at all because ... we order all our stuff online and it arrives like magic at the front door – we don’t stop to tell ourselves that both by inclination and capacity we’re less and less interested in going out. But Amazon will increasingly automate its warehouses and fulfillment processes, and eventually the aircraft delivering at least some of it will become remotely piloted, and finally delivery trucks will automate too – though it’s an open question how the goods will be dropped at your door, as you and I and our fellow boomers struggle with our canes and walkers (though we hope that automation can improve those too).

As Matthew Waxman and I have argued  in a different context from vehicles (automated weapon systems, in the latest Policy Review), changes that increase automation (to the point of the machine making decisions and executing them without human intervention) in self-driving vehicles (and, for that matter, weapons, but this will be the topic of my next post) are coming incrementally.  That would not be true of some technological systems, where the change-over has to be a genuine paradigm change of the whole system. Many believed this would be true of cars, for example – I certainly did.  A technological change to self-driving vehicles was widely presumed to require a centralized computer network to control all the cars in the system.  Yet in this case, it’s not turning out that way – because the sensors and other automated technologies can be applied (and sold mostly as safety features) car by car, and they are able to cope with non-self-driving cars cars and other hazards that are not corralled within a single controlled system.  The Times article addresses exactly this point:

The systems offer auditory, visual and mechanical warnings if a collision is imminent — and increasingly, if needed, take evasive actions automatically. By the middle of this decade, under certain conditions, they will take over the task of driving completely at both high and low speeds.

But the new systems are poised to refashion the nature of driving fundamentally long before completely autonomous vehicles arrive. “This is really a bridge,” said Ragunathan Rajkumar, a computer science professor who is leading a Carnegie Mellon University automated driving research project partly financed by General Motors. “The driver is still in control. But if the driver is not doing the right thing, the technology takes over.”

Although drivers — at least for now — remain responsible for their vehicles, a host of related legal and insurance issues have already arisen, and researchers are opening a new line of study about how humans interact with the automatic systems.

I agree that there will be an important field of study concerning human-robot interactions – calling Susan Calvin, etc.  Some of that will be at the level of general human behavior – I mean in the sense of the Uncanny Valley and that kind of psychological study of human beings.  But much of that will be at the level of highly particular technological systems that deal with such apparently mundane, un-SusanCalvin behavior as how humans brake, accelerate, and have difficulty estimating distances and angles in parallel parking and what kinds of machine systems can address it.  A lot of it won’t be psychology as such, but instead simply machine consequences of the fact that the automation of some parts of the system (“platoons” of self-driving cars on the highway, for example, operating at distances and speeds that would be radically unsafe if not impossible for human beings) will put the decision making and execution beyond human capability.

We are still a ways from that, however.  To get a sense of the incremental changes coming today, consider the kinds of activities ripe for automation on this sidebar list from the Times article, naming various automated safety systems available or coming for cars:

Already in some cars:

Antilock brakes
Electronic stability control
Lane keeping
Lane departure warning
Pedestrian detection
Driver fatigue/distraction alert
Cruise control/adaptive cruise control
Forward collision avoidance
Automatic braking
Automated parking
Adaptive headlights
Traffic sign detection

Coming soon:

Traffic jam assistance
Super cruise control
Night assistance thermal imaging
V2X communications
Intersection assistance
Traffic light detection

(In my next post, I return again to the comparison of self-driving cars and automated weapon systems, and raise the idea of an “Ethical Turing Test” for evaluating the ethical behaviors of human beings and machines.)

(Thanks Instapundit for the link.)  Driverless cars are coming faster than most observers would have thought.  One big reason, according to Bryant Walker Smith in a recent article in Slate, is that people predicting the driverless car future assumed that they would have to be part of centrally-run systems, with corresponding changes to physical infrastructure, such as special roads embedded with magnets.  Or for that matter, we can add, centralized computers to take control of all the vehicles in the system.  The changeover has to be centralized and take place for a given area all at once; it doesn’t scale incrementally.  That was the thought, anyway, and Smith (who is a fellow at Stanford’s Center for the Internet and Society) says that as a consequence, ever “since the 1930s, self-driving cars have been just 20 years away.”

II
Self-Driving Cars

Today’s self-driving systems, however, are “intended to work with existing technologies.”  They use sensors and computers to act as individual vehicles responding to the environment around them individually, without having to be a cog in the larger machine.  This means that they can adapt to the existing infrastructures rather than requiring that they all be replaced as a whole system.  Smith’s real point, however, is to go on from physical infrastructure to include the rules of the road.  Infrastructure also includes, he says,

laws that govern motor vehicles: driver licensing requirements, rules of the road, and principles of product liability, to name but a few. One major question remains, though. Will tomorrow’s cars and trucks have to adapt to today’s legal infrastructure, or will that infrastructure adapt to them?

Smith takes up the most basic of these questions – are self-driving vehicles legal in the US?  They probably can be, he says – and he should know, as the author of a Stanford CIS White Paper that is the leading analysis of the topic.  Self-driving vehicles

Still unclear, even with these early adopters, is the precise responsibility of the human user, assuming one exists. Must the “drivers” remain vigilant, their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road? If not, what are they allowed to do inside, or outside, the vehicle? Under Nevada law, the person who tells a self-driving vehicle to drive becomes its driver. Unlike the driver of an ordinary vehicle, that person may send text messages. However, they may not “drive” drunk—even if sitting in a bar while the car is self-parking. Broadening the practical and economic appeal of self-driving vehicles may require releasing their human users from many of the current legal duties of driving.

For now, however, the appropriate role of a self-driving vehicle’s human operator is not merely a legal question; it is also a technical one. At least at normal speeds, early generations of such vehicles are likely to be joint human-computer systems; the computer may be able to direct the vehicle on certain kinds of roads in certain kinds of traffic and weather, but its human partner may need to be ready to take over in some situations, such as unexpected road works.  A great deal of research will be done on how these transitions should be managed. Consider, for example, how much time you would need to stop reading this article, look up at the road, figure out where you are and resume steering and braking. And consider how far your car would travel in that time. (Note: Do not attempt this while driving your own car.)

Though much of my attention goes to military drones used outside the US, the regulatory issues surrounding US domestic drones are vital and difficult.  Domestic drones of many types, sizes, and functions will become an increasingly important part of US aviation over time, and the issues are thorny.  Lawyer types like me tend to focus on privacy issues, or government surveillance, and such issues – but there are big questions long before one gets to those about how even to integrate drones into the existing domestic airspace.  The FAA has been tasked by Congress to get on with resolving the whole range of domestic drone issues.  Wells Bennett – a lawyer who is the Lawfare blog’s Special Correspondent and a Visiting Fellow in National Security Law at the Brookings Institution – has a new paper up at the Brookings website (link here at Lawfare) on how it’s coming along.  It covers:

• (1) key benchmarks set by the FAA Modernization and Authorization Act, the statute behind the integration process;
• (2) the agency’s progress to date in meeting those benchmarks; and
• (3) core policy issues that must be addressed before late 2015—the so-called “deadline” for integration of privately–as well as government-operated drones.

Wired (H/T Instapundit) has a nice article by Daniela Hernandez on the coming of “robo-doctors.” Not  yet quite what our sci-fi imaginations desire, but still an important development on its own terms:

Charlie Huiner, the vice president of InTouch Health care ... sees robo-docs rising ... His company is developing robots that allow doctors to “provide their care and expertise” remotely, he said at the second day of the Wired Health Conference.  Huiner doesn’t call his robots replacement doctors. He calls them conduits of care. The robot’s patented autonomous capabilities let a flesh-and-blood doctor on the other side tell their android helper what to do. “It is as easy as tapping a point on a map or a patient room [on an iPad] and the robot will go there,” Huiner told Wired.

He showcased the company’s new ‘bot, RP-VITA, or Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant, at Wired Health with company CEO Yulun Wang teleconferencing in from another location. “It’s like the movie Avatar, but for medical applications,” Wang said, appearing on the robot’s monitor-head, which has two eye socket-like cavities. (They’re a user-controlled, eye-friendly laser pointer.) The humanoid ‘bot, which InTouch developed with Roomba-maker iRobot, also can interface with third-party apps.

This technology in effect combines remote-conduits (doctor at different location; machine with patient); locomotion (tell machine where to go and it goes there); robotic capabilities and sensors to do things like take temperature (capabilities that will presumably get more sophisticated over time); and AI capacities for assisting the remotely-located doctor to do diagnosis.

There are important roles for automation, AI, and robotics with regard to the doctor’s role in “seeing” a patient – diagnostic computers will likely become increasingly important adjuncts for the doctor.  But my guess is that most of the genuinely “robotic” activities in health care will turn out to be ways to assist nurses, orderlies, and others dealing with patients in much more basic functions.  That is, the functions that are about physical movement by the machine with regard to the patient.  I don’t believe this will involve replacing nurses, but instead shifting them from some routine and physical tasks both to tasks they already perform that require judgment about patient needs as well as new tasks – increasing the nurse practitioner role while using machines to help with other things.

Beyond that, I venture that there’s a whole world of robotic and cyborgian machines waiting to emerge for the assisted living, or pre-assisted living, care of the elderly.  I spend some time these days seeing relatives at an assisted living facility; one takeaway – I’d be curious whether there is any market research on these things – is that the elderly tend to see these machines not as dehumanizing them by making them deal with machines, but instead a way of maintaining their independence through technology.  It’s not likely we’re limited in the technological possibilities to those scooters advertised on TV for Grandma.  Whether there will be the research and development funding to come up with these tools and bring them to market – and whether they can be cost effective by comparison to humans over time, I don’t know.  What is your prognosis for medical, nursing, elder care, rehab, and other such machines and technology – all kinds – from either a technological and business model standpoint?  (I’ve opened comments on this post.)