Is DARPA Developing an Autonomous Robot That Could Kill?

The Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) is famous for their robotics contests. Through these contests the agency developed the autonomous car, and many are aware, yet concerned, that an autonomous robot might soon be developed.

The Fukushima radiation disaster that happened in Japan three years ago spurred the idea to develop an autonomous robot to enter an unsafe environment to take care of simple manual tasks. The Fukushima disaster worsened because the fear of radiation poisoning distanced the workers from stopping the leak in a timely fashion.

Three of the plant's six reactors melted down during periods of inactivity, and this worsened the radiation leaks, which eventually wound up in the Pacific Ocean.

"There is good evidence that if we had been able to send in some kind of robot and had that robot do relatively simple things, simple manual tasks like opening valves, opening doors, getting to control panels, a lot of the following disaster could have been averted, " said Brian Gerkey of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, in this NPR article.

This sounds like a good idea, which is now DARPA's latest challenge. But if these robots are given the intelligence to operate on their own, how can we be so sure that they won't have the ability to be destructive at any point? After all, as Peter Singer (the author of "Wired for War") notes, the "D" in DARPA stands for "defense."

Sure, an autonomous robot could be used in a disaster situation and enter hostile environments that humans otherwise are unable to enter, but this would merely be step one for this military-funded project to be further developed to operate, say, modern weaponry. Illah Nourbakhsh is a roboticist that has acknowledged these potential dangers, and he's been careful throughout his career to avoid military funded projects.

Soon enough, he believes, roboticists will be pushed to the point to build machines that can make complex decisions adeptly and autonomously, and this could include the option to kill.

To read more about DARPA and their robotics projects, visit this NPR article as well as this Live Science article.