43
YSU lecturer discusses killer robots, impact of technology
YOUNGSTOWN
“Mala in se” is what Wendell Wallach, the Dr. Thomas and Albert Shipka Speaker Series lecturer, calls lethal atomic or killer robots.
Mala in se is a Latin term for evil in itself, Wallach said during his Tuesday afternoon lecture at Youngstown State University, “How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control.”
“These machines select their own targets and dispatch something lethal without human involvement,” he explained. “So when you have machines making life and death decisions, that, to me, is a form of evil.”
Wallach is a consultant, ethicist and scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.
He joined the series to explore the impact of technology in the modern world, particularly artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
He challenged listeners to think about ways to regulate growing innovations.
“The frame of mind is that all of this is inevitable, and there’s nothing you can do about it – if we don’t do it, somebody else will,” Wallach said. “But other countries go beyond thinking about their national bodies. If it’s dangerous, you can’t do it unless you demonstrate a way to prevent that danger. In America, sometimes we don’t do that, and we think we’ll deal with it after the fact.”
This is a result of “too much going on,” he said.
“Legislators can’t keep up with the science,” Wallach said. “They don’t even understand half the science. They don’t understand half the impact and they aren’t funding the regulators.”
Ray Beiersdorfer, YSU professor of geology and environmental science, agreed legislators aren’t aware of environmental impacts technological innovations have – namely fracking.
“Some people have started taking a community-rights approach because they have the right to stop these kinds of things where they live and are getting penalized in the process for defending these rights,” he said.
Wallach agreed the rights approach may be the only way to help regulate in some aspects.
“Community rights are certainly important,” he said. “They might be perhaps the only way to slow down things.”
Although not all technology is “evil,” Wallach said things have a way of changing over time.
Mala in se, he said, is how Romans described heinous acts such as rape, but not the act of slavery.
Now, the act of slavery is seen as an evil act.
“What if evil can evolve over time?” he asked.