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	Military Killer Robots "may endanger civilians" by AFP / Telegraph   August 2009   Action on a global scale must be taken to curb the development of military killer robots that think for themselves, a leading British expert said.   "Terminator"-style machines that decide how, when and who to kill are just around the corner, warns Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield.   Far from helping to reduce casualties, their use is likely to make conflict and war more common and lead to a major escalation in numbers of civilian deaths, he believes.   "I do think there should be some international discussion and arms control on these weapons but there"s absolutely none," said Prof Sharkey.   "The military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction. The nub of it is that robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability. They can"t distinguish between combatants and civilians. It"s hard enough for soldiers to do that."   Iraq and Afghanistan have both provided ideal "showcases" for robot weapons, said Prof Sharkey.   The "War on Terror" declared by President George Bush spurred on the development of pilotless drone aircraft deployed against insurgents.   Initially used for surveillance, drones such as the Predator and larger Reaper were now armed with bombs and missiles.   The US currently has 200 Predators and 30 Reapers and next year alone will be spending 5.5 billion dollars (£3.29 billion) on unmanned combat vehicles.   At present these weapons are still operated remotely by humans sitting in front of computer screens. RAF pilots on secondment were among the more experienced controllers used by the US military, while others only had six weeks training, said Prof Sharkey. "If you"re good at computer games, you"re in," he added.   But rapid progress was being made towards robots which took virtually all their own decisions and were merely "supervised" by humans. These would be fully autonomous killing machines reminiscent of those depicted in the "Terminator" films.   "The next thing that"s coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots," said Prof Sharkey speaking to journalists in London. "The robot will do the killing itself. This will make decision making faster and allow one person to control many robots. A single soldier could initiate a large scale attack from the air and the ground. "It could happen now; the technology"s there."   A step on the way had already been taken by Israel with "Harpy", a pilotless aircraft that flies around searching for an enemy radar signal. When it thinks one has been located and identified as hostile, the drone turns into a homing missile and launches an attack - all without human intervention.   Last year the British aerospace company BAe Systems completed a flying trial with a group of drones that could communicate with each other and select their own targets, said Prof Starkey. The United States Air Force was looking at the concept of "swarm technology" which involved multiple drone aircraft operating together.   Flying drones were swiftly being joined by armed robot ground vehicles, such as the Talon Sword which bristles with machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles.   However it was likely to be decades before such robots possessed a human-like ability to tell friend from foe. Even with human controllers, drones were already stacking up large numbers of civilian casualties.   As a result of 60 known drone attacks in Pakistan between January 2006 and April 2009, 14 al Qaida leaders had been killed but also 607 civilians, said Prof Sharkey.   Prof Sharkey, who insists he is "not a pacifist" and has no anti-war agenda, said: "If we keep on using robot weapons we"re going to put civilians at grave risk and it"s going to be much easier to start wars. The main inhibitor of wars is body bags coming home.   "People talk about programming the "laws of war" into a computer to give robots a conscience, so that if the target is a civilian you don"t shoot. But for a robot to recognise a civilian you need an exact specification, and one of the problems is there"s no specific definition of a civilian. Soldiers have to rely on common sense. "I"m not saying it will never happen, but I know what"s out there and it"s not going to happen for a long time."   Feb 2009   Robots "to fight future wars". (AFP)   US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015, a military researcher predicts.   Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves the lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.   "We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Singer said. "What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?"   The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame, and some real-world weapon controls copy the designs of controllers for popular videogame consoles. Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.   Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.   "The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."   There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Mr Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.   "You don"t have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said.   Robots also record everything they see with built-in cameras, generating digital video that routinely gets posted online at YouTube in graphic clips that soldiers refer to as "war porn", according to Singer.   "It turns war into entertainment, sometimes set to music," Singer said. "The ability to watch more but experience less." Visit the related web page
	Water Wars by Jeffrey D. Sachs Earth Institute at Columbia University   July 2009   Many conflicts are caused or inflamed by water scarcity. The conflicts from Chad to Darfur, Sudan, to the Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, to Somalia and its pirates, and across to Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, lie in a great arc of arid lands where water scarcity is leading to failed crops, dying livestock, extreme poverty, and desperation.   Extremist groups like the Taliban find ample recruitment possibilities in such impoverished communities. Governments lose their legitimacy when they cannot guarantee their populations’ most basic needs: safe drinking water, staple food crops, and fodder and water for the animal herds on which communities depend for their meager livelihoods.   Politicians, diplomats, and generals in conflict-ridden countries typically treat these crises as they would any other political or military challenge. They mobilize armies, organize political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.   But these responses overlook the underlying challenge of helping communities meet their urgent needs for water, food, and livelihoods. As a result, the United States and Europe often spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to send troops or bombers to quell uprisings or target “failed states,” but do not send one-tenth or even one-hundredth of that amount to address the underlying crises of water scarcity and under-development.   Water problems will not go away by themselves. On the contrary, they will worsen unless we, as a global community, respond. A series of recent studies shows how fragile the water balance is for many impoverished and unstable parts of the world. The United Nations agency UNESCO recently issued The UN World Water Development Report 2009 ; the World Bank issued powerful studies on India ( India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future ) and Pakistan ( Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry ); and the Asia Society issued an overview of Asia’s water crises ( Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future ).   These reports tell a similar story. Water supplies are increasingly under stress in large parts of the world, especially in the world’s arid regions. Rapidly intensifying water scarcity reflects bulging populations, depletion of groundwater, waste and pollution, and the enormous and increasingly dire effects of manmade climate change.   The consequences are harrowing: drought and famine, loss of livelihood, the spread of water-borne diseases, forced migrations, and even open conflict. Practical solutions will include many components, including better water management, improved technologies to increase the efficiency of water use, and new investments undertaken jointly by governments, the business sector, and civic organizations.   I have seen such solutions in the Millennium Villages in rural Africa, a project in which my colleagues and I are working with poor communities, governments, and businesses to find practical solutions to the challenges of extreme rural poverty. In Senegal, for example, a world-leading pipe manufacturer, JM Eagle, donated more than 100 kilometers of piping to enable an impoverished community to join forces with the government water agency PEPAM to bring safe water to tens of thousands of people. The overall project is so cost effective, replicable, and sustainable that JM Eagle and other corporate partners will now undertake similar efforts elsewhere in Africa.   But future water stresses will be widespread, including both rich and poor countries. The US, for example, encouraged a population boom in its arid southwestern states in recent decades, despite water scarcity that climate change is likely to intensify. Australia, too, is grappling with serious droughts in the agricultural heartland of the Murray-Darling River basin. The Mediterranean Basin, including Southern Europe and North Africa is also likely to experience serious drying as a result of climate change.   However, the precise nature of the water crisis will vary, with different pressure points in different regions. For example, Pakistan, an already arid country, will suffer under the pressures of a rapidly rising population, which has grown from 42 million in 1950 to 184 million in 2010, and may increase further to 335 million in 2050, according to the UN’s “medium” scenario. Even worse, farmers are now relying on groundwater that is being depleted by over-pumping. Moreover, the Himalayan glaciers that feed Pakistan’s rivers may melt by 2050, owing to global warming.   Solutions will have to be found at all “scales,” meaning that we will need water solutions within individual communities (as in the piped-water project in Senegal), along the length of a river (even as it crosses national boundaries), and globally, for example, to head off the worst effects of global climate change. Lasting solutions will require partnerships between government, business, and civil society, which can be hard to negotiate and manage, since these different sectors of society often have little or no experience in dealing with each other and may mistrust each other considerably.   Most governments are poorly equipped to deal with serious water challenges. Water ministries are typically staffed with engineers and generalist civil servants. Yet lasting solutions to water challenges require a broad range of expert knowledge about climate, ecology, farming, population, engineering, economics, community politics, and local cultures. Government officials also need the skill and flexibility to work with local communities, private businesses, international organizations, and potential donors.   A crucial next step is to bring together scientific, political, and business leaders from societies that share the problems of water scarcity – for example, Sudan, Pakistan, the US, Australia, Spain, and Mexico – to brainstorm about creative approaches to overcoming them. Such a gathering would enable information-sharing, which could save lives and economies. It would also underscore a basic truth: the common challenge of sustainable development should unify a world divided by income, religion, and geography.   * Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
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