Dick Sblog

I was listening to the radio this morning as I dragged myself into a new day. They were talking about developing autonomous military robots – killing machines that could be programmed to respect the Geneva Conventions.

This prompted two thoughts – firstly that computers are great at crunching numbers and making decisions based on rules. But (at least so far) they are pretty hopeless at solving real problems because they are unable to analyse context and sort out what’s important from unimportant. This seems to me to be a significant barrier to a machine honouring the Conventions. After all, faced with a figure in a chador holding a bundle, even a human might have problems determining whether or not this was a woman carrying a small child, a female suicide bomber or a male insurgent in disguise. What would the machine do, shoot first and then apologise?

The second and more depressing thought was about the ways in which we prioritise our activities. Apparently, the US defence research establishments have spent over $4bn on this strand of development – using human ingenuity to develop more sophisticated ways of killing other humans. This is against a background of decreasing food stability, increasing poverty across much of Africa, increasing political instability, environmental degradation, antibiotic resistance in pathogens and, of course, climate change etc etc.

Finding positive examples of the use of human ingenuity is therefore both a relief and an affirmation of goodness. Another story this morning was of a MSF surgeon working in poor conditions in Congo who took guidance by SMS text messaging from a colleague thousands of miles away. These instructions enabled him successfully to carry out an amputation, saving the life of a young man.

Another, which I mentioned in a blog a few days ago, is the use of the World Community Grid to help the search for effective treatments for Aids. I’m grateful to a comment from Brian drawing my attention to a video that WCG created to commemorate World AIDS Day.