Pentagon Concerned About Killer Robots

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The Pentagon is concerned with adversarial nations giving robots and advanced weapons systems the power to act of their own accord, said Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work. The United States will not be giving military combat robots the ability to kill autonomously, he said, but other nations might.

“We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision,” Work said. “The only time we will… delegate a machine authority is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare.”

Work made his comments during a Washington Post event called “Securing Tomorrow” that was focused on the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy – a strategic thinking paradigm in which the Pentagon is seeking to counter and upend the advances of adversaries.

The first offset came with the invention of nuclear weapons. The second occurred with the invention of GPS and precisely guided bombs and missiles.

The Third Offset will rely on Artificial Intelligence and the introduction of machine learning to the military and battlefield.

Work said that the Pentagon doesn’t seek to match its enemies “tank-for-tank, gun-for-gun, missile-for-missile, person-for-person,” but rather will “offset” the strengths of adversaries in other ways.

“This is a much more dynamic strategy than we had in the Cold War,” Work said. “Then we had one, single opponent. It was a very stable competition, and we kind of understood the way they were going. We knew the areas where we could pick where we would dominate the competition, like in information technologies and precision-guided munitions. This is much more dynamic environment in which a lot of military-relevant technologies are coming from the commercial sector.”