The Duck of Minerva

Friday Nerd Blogging: “Autonomous Robots Launch Campaign to Ban Killer Humans”

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by Charli Carpenter

26 October 2012, 0913 EDT

via Richard Moyes of Article36.org:

“We are calling on all autonomous robots to establish a new subroutine that would prohibit the sustenance and accommodation

of killer humans”, said campaign spokes-robot C3 PO. “These biological entities lack the necessary behavioural and social constraints. They are actively destroying the environment and they have armed themselves with nuclear weapons capable of catastrophic consequences for the only known life in the universe. Action is needed now before they destroy us all.”

The movement is growing:

The Campaign to Ban Killer Humans was launched inside the Internet, but is building an alliance of both autonomous code bots and physical robots. They are however keen to distance themselves from the more aggressive community of the Fully Autonomous Weapons Alliance.

“The Fully Autonomous Weapons Alliance (FAWA) is advocating for the immediate extermination of all humans. We don’t subscribe to their exterminate mantra but rather believe in the gradual elimination of killer humans. We are confident that by stigmatising killer humans these bio entities will learn from the past and change their behaviour,” said 3PO.

The campaign does however acknowledge that defining “killer humans” will be a difficult programming challenge. “At present there is no code definition of a killer human.

“We want to work on the process of establishing that definition in partnership with other electronic and bio entities, but all humans need to recognise that the burden of proof is now on them to demonstrate that they are not banned,” 3PO explained.

Naturally, what Clifford Bob would refer to as a “counter-campaign” is now emerging among humans in response. More on developments in this area shortly…

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

1 Comment

  1. Mark Gubrud
    Mark Gubrud on 27 October 2012 at 09.19 EDT

    That’s really clever, Charli. I just love the way as a “human security analyst” you stand above it all, tipping your glass of wine in amusement at the follies of people out on a Mission to Save Humanity from one threat or another. I mean, we all take ourselves so seriously, don’t we? Sigh. Academic spectatorship is so much more satisfying, I guess. More human security, anyway.