Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Bombs, Innovation, and Afghanistan

In today's New York Times, James Dao reports that Afghan IEDs

are becoming more common and more sophisticated with each week, American military officers say. This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.'s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war. ... At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, an American military official said.

At least three of the lessons we drew from Iraq seem to apply in Afghanistan. First, IEDs enable insurgents to strike with a level of precision that would be impossible from a distance. Second, IEDs can be assembled from inexpensive, readily available components, such as fertilizer, artillery shells, and cell phones. Third, instead of risking human lives, you can hunt or disable IEDs with dogs or robots. The bomber isn't risking his life. Why risk yours?

Afghan insurgents are exploiting the same cheap technology that worked in Iraq. According to Dao, "The bombs are often made with fertilizer and diesel fuel, but some use mortar shells or old mines that litter the countryside. Some bombs are set off when vehicles pass over pressure plates. Others require remote control, like a cellphone. Still others detonate with a button or a wire touched to a battery." Likewise, we're using familiar detection methods: dogs, robots, and drones.

So what has changed? One difference is a lower level of technology in Afghanistan. Sometimes this works to the insurgents' advantage:

With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.'s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.

But it can also make them vulnerable. U.S. officials tell Dao that IED deployment networks connect top layers of "financiers, logistical experts, bomb designers and trainers" with lower layers of "bomb planters, often villagers or nomadic herdsmen paid $10 or less to dig holes and serve as spotters." The weak link is the top layer. In Afghanistan, there may be fewer people with the expertise to run such networks than there were in Iraq.

To get the key players, you have to operate like a crime scene investigator. Dao reports:

Like a police forensic unit and a bomb squad rolled into one, Lieutenant Brown's 25-member team not only disarms I.E.D.'s but also scours sites—more than 50 this year—for telltale signatures of a bomb. Soil samples, electrical parts, fingerprints and photographs are sent for analysis, and detailed reports are compiled in a central database.

This is one of the main questions being tested in Afghanistan: Can forensic investigation and a pooled database unravel IED networks? Can high-tech police work catch the experts and organizers instead of settling for the suckers who plant the bombs? IEDs, like drones, are an evolving story of measures and countermeasures, technologies of destruction and technologies of detection. We don't know how the story will turn out. But we know which weapon will prevail. It won't be a device. It will be a process, a talent, and an attitude: innovation.

Armed Robotry

I've been meaning to get back to this Cornelia Dean piece from last week's NYT Science Times. It's about one of my favorite topics: military robots. Except it confounds some of my assumptions, which makes it all the more worth thinking about.

First off: The "killing machines" I keep writing about are just drones. They're fully controlled (except for malfunctions and weather) by human pilots. Dean is talking about something way more unnerving: machines that make their own killing decisions. I had assumed that for safety reasons, this kind of technology was still confined to the computer equivalent of drawing boards. Wrong. Army software contractor Ronald Arkin tells Dean that armed mechanical border guards are already on the job in Israel and South Korea. Here in the United States, the Army is paying Arkin and others to explore, among other things, how to design such robots to "operate within the bounds imposed by the warfighter." In other words, before we give them guns, we'd better figure out how to keep them from screwing up royally or turning on us.

What's really interesting about Arkin is that he directly contradicts my paranoid prejudice. It's not the armed robots I should worry about. It's the armed humans. Dean summarizes his argument:

In a report to the Army last year, Dr. Arkin described some of the potential benefits of autonomous fighting robots. For one thing, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness, Dr. Arkin wrote, and they can be made invulnerable to what he called "the psychological problem of ‘scenario fulfillment,' " which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas.

His report drew on a 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, which found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior. Troops who were stressed, angry, anxious or mourning lost colleagues or who had handled dead bodies were more likely to say they had mistreated civilian noncombatants, the survey said.

That makes sense: In war, emotion is more hindrance than help. Same goes for my previous speculation that pilots will become more brutal as they're insulated from physical risk. Arkin's data suggest that in fact, exposure to physical risk makes troops more aggressive, not less. Again, the theory makes sense: You shoot first and ask questions later when failure to shoot jeopardizes your safety. Take the ego out of it—make you a robot instead of a person—and the self-protective instinct to shoot first disappears.

That leaves the problem of ethics. Hormones, mirror neurons, socialization, and love, among other things, make most people reluctant to kill one another. Robots lack these inputs. Will they be ruthless? Arkin's answer, as related by Dean, is that "because rules like the Geneva Conventions are based on humane principles, building them into the machine's mental architecture endows it with a kind of empathy."

Well, I wouldn't go that far. It's not empathy, exactly. But maybe empathy isn't so hot as a guide to behavior in combat. Maybe one lesson of the Army's Iraq survey is that empathy too easily morphs into tribalism. Maybe mechanical soldiers programmed with ethical rules, like the machines of I, Robot, are more likely to behave decently.

But then comes the hitch: What happens when the grainy realities of war defy the simplicity of the robot's program? What happens when the hard part isn't restraining yourself from firing on civilians, but distinguishing them from enemy forces in the first place? That's where Arkin's dream bogs down. He admits it would be hard for robots to recognize physical changes that entail moral changes, such as an enemy fighter with a wound or a white flag. And that's basic stuff compared to the multiplying subtleties of modern counterinsurgency. It's not as though al-Qaida hands out uniforms. Is the guy with the backpack a student or a terrorist? Is the woman across the street chubby or wearing a belt full of explosives?

Here's my preliminary take on Arkin's idea: He's right that we can and should substitute robots for humans in some lethal jobs. Where the categories are clear and cold reason is crucial, let the robots do the guarding and killing. But don't give the early generations of robots any jobs that require nuanced judgments about who's a bad guy and who isn't. And be prepared for the bad guys to learn the loopholes in the robots' algorithms. If the robots respect white flags, the terrorists will use white flags. If the robots presume women are civilians, the terrorists will use women. That's what terrorists do: They study our habits and exploit them. It's a human skill. And it will take humans, not robots, to defeat them.

I, LawnBott

If I had a nickel for every time I've read the word "robot" in a headline about new technology, I'd ... well, given the current price of metals, I'd melt down all those nickels, sell the ingredients, and become a very rich man. Journalists and PR people use the word "robot" to mean anything from HAL to a remote-controlled toy car. Actually, robots come in various degrees. The revolution we're seeing in mechanization isn't so much in the proliferation of robots as in their increasing autonomy.

Case in point: Two stories from this morning's news batch.

First we have an AP story about a "Bum Bot" designed to disperse vagrants from an iffy neighborhood in Atlanta. It belongs to Rufus Terrill, a local bar owner and ex-Marine. The story says Terrill used to patrol the area on foot, but "guns were stuck in his face several times. His wife suggested he patrol a safer way - using a robot." In the AP photo, the robot looks like a small tank, about half as tall as Terrill. It weighs 300 pounds and has a camera and water cannon. (Terrill says he's never used the cannon.) The robot's exterior has been "nicked by rocks, bricks and other objects people Terrill was rousting have thrown at it."

The point of the robot, it seems, is to take the physical risks formerly taken by its human owner. Any guns that might previously have been stuck in his face now have to be pointed at his tank instead, which doesn't have quite the same effect. There's no report of the tank having been shot, but, as the story says, it has taken its share of rocks and bricks. That's fine. It's part of the plan. Sticks and stones may break my drones, but they can't hurt me.

In this way, the Bum Bot is a lot like the thousands of drones currently deployed by the U.S. military. The enemy can't kill American soldiers who patrol war zones from a safe distance via remotely-operated unmanned vehicles.

The tricky thing about drones, as I've noted before, is that they can desensitize you to the battlefield. I mean literally desensitize you: Your physical senses have no direct contact with what you're looking or shooting at. Can the same thing happen to civilians who use private security drones at home? Apparently so. "It's just like a video game," says Terrill, describing how he operates the Bum Bot. The Atlanta police warn that he might be prosecuted if he uses the water cannon. But there's no such constraint on the use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq.

The chief constraint on the Bum Bot isn't legal or moral. It's technological. The Bum Bot isn't really a robot. It's controlled entirely by the handheld remote, and it has no voice other than Terrill's, which he projects through an integrated walkie-talkie. Without constant human direction, the machine does nothing.

If you want to get closer to the cutting edge of robotics, so to speak, you're better off looking at a technology that's already well-commercialized: robotic lawn mowers. Today's New York Times salutes a new product, the Kyodo LawnBott LB3500, which mows your lawn by itself. Here's the manufacturer's description:

It operates automatically, and autonomously by means of its intelligent computer and a perimeter cable. It can move freely within an enclosed area, detecting the faint signal transmitted by the perimeter cable located on the ground, defining the areas to be mowed; it can also work without a perimeter cable as working area is enclosed by a fence or small border at least 4 inches tall. ... [I]t leaves its docking station and starts mowing your yard in a random direction. It will mow in a straight line until it bumps into an obstacle, such as a tree or flower pot, or until it runs over its perimeter cable, then it stops, backs up, turns and takes off again.

Well, at least it needs a human to recharge its batteries, right?

Wrong. The company explains:

When the batteries start running low, or at the end of its cutting cycle, the mower will search out the perimeter cable and follow it back to its docking station to recharge. After charging, it heads back out on its own! ... With the new LawnBott, you have One Less Thing to Worry About.

Well, yes. But you also have one more thing to worry about: Your lawnmower running amok while you're at the office. No human hassle means no human control.

Kyodo says the LB3500 comes with enhanced safety features: "a higher sensitivity, free-floating, 360° bumper shell, blade stop proximity sensor, and an on-board alarm system should an unauthorized user pick up the Lawnbott." Still, we're talking about a slicing machine that runs around by itself and can't even be stopped by power depletion. LawnBotts.com points out that "robotic lawnmowers are many times safer than its manual counterparts just because you eliminate the human needing to be around it while it's operating." This is the same sense in which military drones are safer than manned vehicles and weapons: They protect their owners. But if you're not the owner, look out.

In the AP story about Terrill's bar, some of the locals complain that the Bum Bot is "intimidating." They have no idea what's coming.