Overview

Autonomous weapons systems, often referred to as 'killer robots', have been a hallmark of popular imagination for decades. However, with the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence systems (AI) and robotics, killer robots are quickly becoming a reality. These lethal technologies can learn, adapt, and potentially make life and death decisions on the battlefield with little-to-no human involvement. This naturally leads to not only legal but ethical concerns as to whether we can meaningful control such machines, and if so, then how. Such concerns are made even more poignant by the ever-present fear that something may go wrong, and the machine may carry out some action(s) violating the ethics or laws of war. Researchers, policymakers, and designers are caught in the quagmire of how to approach these highly controversial systems and to figure out what exactly it means to have meaningful human control over them, if at all. In Designed for Death, Dr Steven Umbrello aims to not only produce a realistic but also an optimistic guide for how, with human values in mind, we can begin to design killer robots. Drawing on the value sensitive design (VSD) approach to technology innovation, Umbrello argues that context is king and that a middle path for designing killer robots is possible if we consider both ethics and design as fundamentally linked. Umbrello moves beyond the binary debates of whether or not to prohibit killer robots and instead offers a more nuanced perspective of which types of killer robots may be both legally and ethically acceptable, when they would be acceptable, and how to design for them.

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Steven Umbrello is the Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Delft University of Technology and a Stiftung Sudtiroler Sparkasse Global Fellow at Eurac Research. He studied philosophy of science and technology at the University of Toronto (H.B.A), epistemology, ethics, and mind at the University of Edinburgh (MSc), science and technology studies at York University (MA), and the ethics and design of AI at the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium (PhD). His research focuses more broadly on value sensitive design, its philosophical foundations as well as its application to novel technologies like AI, nanotech, and Industry 4.0.

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