Our Founding Perspective
Human Judgement is Essential for Warfare

BY NEIL TREAT + JASON RUGOLO

We live at a pivotal time in the history of humanity.

Warfare has always used tools, and we humans are brilliant toolmakers.  From bludgeoning each other with rocks, to running each other through with arrows and spears, through harnessing the power of highly kinetic chemical reactions and pushing them through space faster and faster and further and further, and finally to our more recent harvesting of the nucleus and it’s terrifying display of dominance; we have arrived at place in the history of warfighting technology in which we humans are capable of destruction at a scale that makes any sane person shutter at the full thought of it.

Each era of warfare has been marked by a steady increase in the capabilities of our technologies.  Yet, nearly every weapon that we humans have deployed through history has one critical thing in common: there has always been a human holding the rock, a human pulling the bow string or gripping the spear, a human finger on the trigger, and a human hand inserting the biscuit into the nuclear football.

As our technology has become more powerful, the responsibility felt by the hands of our service men and women in the United States of America has steadily increased.  These great people who protect us know of the power that they wield better than anyone, and they take that responsibility seriously, courageously, and magnanimously.  Since the end of World War II, the USA could have dominated the entire world with force, subjugating the world population and its abundant resources under our rule and to our benefit, where we to have had the will to do so.  

But yet, we did not.  And, we will not.  There is a simple reason for this.  We decide not to, because it would be wrong to do so.

We weigh complex values against each other, like liberty, freedom, and goodness, against safety, risk, and evil.  The truth of the matter is that these values are subjective, and people all over the world disagree both on the definitions of them, and perhaps moreso on the trade-offs between them.  Even inside the United States, where our brilliant Founders decided to prioritize liberty against the possible rise of a tyrannical government by enshrining the right of our citizens to arm themselves, there are many in the modern political milieu whom do not see the value any longer.  They argue that risking domestic violence for the sake of some perceived future liberty is a bad trade, and they therefore want to disarm the population of our more violent weapons.  Human value systems are complicated, and messy.  We will likely always disagree, both between nations, and inside our own nation.  That makes the following observation both pertinent and somewhat terrifying:

We are no longer only writing the history of mankind; we are now witnessing the very birth of the history of machine-kind.

There is a new form of intelligence—the machine intelligences born out of the same stuff rocks are made of—which, through our own human inventive genius, are shockingly outpacing our abilities in almost every single narrow application of sensation, reasoning, information processing, and control.

If you can find us a specific action that humans can still do better than machines, we can either build you a machine now that will do it better, or we are confident we will be able to very soon.

We therefore find ourselves at a bifurcation point in the history of military doctrine.  We as a society, and preferably, together as a species on Earth, have a deeply profound decision to make.

Should we enable intelligent machines to fight our wars without us?  To protect our service men and women by keeping them as far away from the battlefield as possible, while limiting the loss of American lives and maximizing our lethality and destructive power down range?

Or should we demand, as a moral requirement, that there must always be, with very little exception, a human-in-the-loop of those critical life and death decisions that we empower our troops to make according to our Great Nation’s values?

We believe deeply in the latter, and are strongly opposed to those modern technologists who are currently exploring autonomous machine approaches to killing.  It is the judicious application of our values, making extremely high quality decisions in the most difficult decision scenarios and environments, that will keep us doing the thing that is the most important for us humans to do—deciding the right way that we want to manifest as a species in the world.  If we go down the path of fully autonomous killing machines, we risk mankind disintegrating into the powerless subjects of a small number of people in control of terrible fleets of pathological warring machines. 

Human judgment is essential for warfare.

While we require human judgment, and consider fully autonomous warfare an enemy to humankind, that does not mean that we should not continue to develop advanced tools using machine intelligence.  In fact, we must develop these tools, or we will rapidly fall behind in warfighting effectiveness and be left vulnerable to future enemies who do want to command machine swarms to kill us.  The alternative to autonomous warring machines is not some pollyannaish wish that we’ll all just slow down in developing machine effectiveness.  It’s quite the opposite, actually.

We must build—aggressively and feverishly build, because our job will be much harder—the human-machine interfaces, and human-machine systems and collaborations that take full advantage of the wonders of machine abilities while serving the critical decisions to our servicemen and women.  We need to make human-in-the-loop systems that are more effective and more powerful than any solely autonomous machine can be. 

Our mission at RAD is to invent and deploy the world’s most advanced technologies to augment our servicemen and women with the superhuman capabilities that make them more effective than autonomous machines alone.

In short, we want to create Ironman, not Terminator.  And we need to make sure our Ironmen and Ironwomen are better than the those Terminators created by our enemies. 

We are on the side of our military personnel, and on the side of humankind, and we hope that you will join us in this perspective. 

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To Our Service Men and Women,

We are deeply grateful for what you do for our country.  

We have studied the most advanced science and technology at America’s best educational institutions and in her most advanced research settings, and we can’t think of a better way to use our skills and knowledge than to serve you.

There is a strange trend in advanced technology in America, where the best practitioners shy away from supporting people like you who protect us.  This is unfortunate and unjust.

We are committed to reversing that trend, and have dedicated ourselves to helping you in the most effective way that we can, with the best that technology has to offer.  

We have your back.

Sincerely,

The RAD Team