- This is a (bleep) up situation.
(alarm blaring)
(glass shattering)
But Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shown
that more and more combat will be done by unmanned robots,
(explosion booms) just like in Hollywood movies.
(tense music)
This is just a movie,
but it's actually a pretty accurate portrayal
of what weapons might look like in the near future.
- We're talking about weapons
that once programmed by a human,
would then make a decision on their own
about which specific targets to attack
without any further human intervention.
- And when I say near future, I mean now.
You might ask, "Why are we doing this?"
Well, for most of human history,
war has just been a giant meat grinder,
masses of humans and their sidekicks
trying desperately to kill each other
with sticks, rocks, swords, and now bombs and guns.
The promise of precision weapons
is to reduce the overall horror of war.
But with this trajectory, is Skynet about to go online?
- Is it acceptable for a machine
to make life and death decisions in war?
There are many situations in war that are gray,
and it's a real challenge when it comes
to autonomous weapons.
How would a robot know the difference
in what's legal and what's right?
How would it know to tell the difference?
- I mean, what could go wrong?
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
- Testing. Camera three.
- This is Paul Scharre. - Yep.
- He's spent a lot of time working in places
like this funky five-sided building,
advising people on policy around robotics,
automation, and the future of warfare.
(uneasy music) (skull crushing)
- When people worry about autonomous weapons,
one of the fears would be robots running amok
and killing civilians,
the sort of things you see in "Terminator" movies.
No one's building that. That's the good news.
- That's exactly what Skynet
would have you believe, Paul.
But anyway, autonomous weapons have actually been around
for a long time.
For example, landmines.
They're not intelligent,
but once they're armed and placed by a human,
they work on their own.
But of course, landmines are (bleep) awful.
Why would we want more autonomous weapons?
- One of the arguments for autonomous weapons
is that just like someday self-driving cars
could reduce accidents on roads,
perhaps machines could do the same in war.
And autonomous weapons could avoid civilian casualties,
making war more precise and more humane.
In World War II, nations bombed entire cities
and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
One of the unfortunate reality of the technology
at the time was bombing was not very precise.
Today, advanced militaries
can actually place a bomb precisely where they want to.
Moving forward, militaries are developing
next-generation robotic combat systems
that would use more autonomy.
How much autonomy is not always clear
when looking at their plans.
Senior Russian military leaders have said
that their intention is to build fully-roboticized units
that are capable of independent operations.
The US military now has in its naval fleet
a ship called the Sea Hunter.
It's a totally autonomous ship.
Swarms are the next step in military robotics.
And people are experimenting with what this might look
and how it would dramatically change military tactics
and warfare.
How do you fight with a swarm?
What are the commands to give a swarm?
How do swarms fight each other?
What are the best tactics for swarm warfare?
The idea of handing a lethal weapon
to a computer would seem, on the face of it,
potentially risky and problematic.
We wanna be mindful of risks
but we also don't wanna, sort of, foreclose the opportunity
that there may be ways
to make war more precise and more humane
and save civilian lives in the process.
(dramatic music) (airplanes whooshing)
- As this technology evolves,
we have to think about how involved humans should be
when technology takes a life.
Are there things we just don't want machines
to decide without us?
- I saw things firsthand in war
that I don't think machines could deal with,
situations that I faced that I think are too complex,
that require human judgment and moral understanding.
There was an incident early in the war in Afghanistan
where I was part of an Army Ranger sniper team.
And on one mission, we infiltrated at night,
and when sun came up, we were pretty exposed.
Now, what we expected to happen was that some fighters
would come to attack us and we were ready for that.
What we didn't expect was they sent a little girl
to scout out our position.
(tense music)
As she walked around us, she would sort of stare at us.
And we heard what we later realized
was the tripping of a radio that she had on her,
reporting back information about us.
Eventually she left, and not long after,
some Taliban fighters did come.
And we took care of them. (guns banging)
But later when we were talking about what we would do
in a similar situation like that,
if we came across someone
and we didn't know if they were a civilian
and they were scouting for the enemy, what would we do?
Something that never came up in conversation was the idea
of shooting this little girl.
(uneasy music)
The laws of war don't set an age for combatants.
You know, what's interesting is
if you programmed a robot to comply perfectly
with the laws of war,
(electronic beeping)
it would've killed this little girl.
(dramatic music)
And I think that's wrong.
I think that would've been morally wrong.
If we had a war and no one felt bad
about the fact that we were killing other human beings,
what would that say about us?
What would it say about us if no one slept uneasy
at night afterwards?
(dramatic music) (planes whooshing)
- Right now the United States
is not building lethal autonomous weapons.
- War presents lots of complex moral challenges
that people face.
And I don't really think that any machines that we see today
or in the foreseeable future will be able to deal
with those challenges.
Not because the machines cannot make those decisions,
but because they shouldn't.
These moments of humanity seem important.
They seem like something that we wouldn't wanna give up.
It's an opportunity for humans to exercise empathy
and recognize the humanity of the other side.
(tense music)
- But if the history of war
has taught us anything,
it's that just because we don't want a technology to be used
for killing people, that doesn't mean it won't be.
- We've seen throughout history that there are many times
when in peacetime, militaries say,
"We're not going to use this kind of technology."
Before World War I, "We won't use poison gas."
Yet once the shooting started and poison gas was available,
military started using it.
Prior to World War II,
military said they wouldn't do aerial attacks on cities.
- A short time ago,
an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima
and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
- In the course of interviewing experts for "Army of None,"
the former director of research
at the Office of Naval Research, Larry Schuette,
asked the really important question of,
"When we're thinking about autonomous weapons,
is it December 6th or December 8th?"
- Flash, Washington.
The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
- Is it before or after this game-changing event?
It might change how we think about risk
(explosion booms)
and what we're willing to tolerate in warfare.
- Come back next time
for another episode of "Hard Reset."
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