Communications of the ACM

the use of autonomous weapons, and whether they will be developed in ways that are consistent with accepted ideas about ethics and war, Saxon says.

“There are good arguments about
increased moral hazard with autono-
mous weapons systems, that they
make killing too easy,” Saxon says.
“I think they also have an effect on
traditional military virtues that need
to be examined. What does it mean
to be courageous, for instance, when
your machines take the risks and do
the killing?”
For Latiff’s part, while he does not
support a ban on autonomous weap-
ons, he would support a non-prolifer-
ation treaty allowing militaries to re-
search and test these systems to ensure
they can be made as reliable and safe
as possible.

“At the end of the day, it’s kind of like nuclear weapons,” Latiff says. “ Everybody’s going to get them, and the people that don’t get them are going to want them. The best we can hope for is that we slow it down.”

Further Reading

U.S. Department of Defense 2012 Directive on Autonomous Weapons: http://www.dtic. mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/300009p.pdf Campaign to Stop Killer Robots: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ Video: Scary Future Military Weapons Of War-Full Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DDJHYEdKCBE

Keith Kirkpatrick is principal of 4K Research & Consulting, LLC, based in Lynbrook, NY.

among potential adversaries. In par-
ticular, the Russians have made great
progress. So have the British; they are
putting together a fighter plane that
can do everything a piloted fighter
plane can, and can be built to higher
performance characteristics, because
you don’t have a human squeezed by
G-forces in the cockpit.”
Others agree, even if they admit that
at present, there are no significant ad-
vantages to using fully autonomous
weapons, versus the semiautonomous
systems already in use.

“I would imagine that [as autono-
mous weapons] become more capa-
ble, they will be seen to operate more
effectively than systems with humans
in the loop,” says Lieutenant Colonel
Michael Saxon, an assistant professor
teaching philosophy at the U.S. Mili-
tary Academy at West Point. “Once
you introduce swarms or you have to
respond to adversary systems that are
autonomous, humans in the loop will
create real disadvantages. This, of
course, is all predicated on advances
in these machines’ capabilities.”
Still, observers suggest while a ban
on autonomous weapons may not be
the right course of action, a deliberate
approach to developing and incorpo-
rating them into the military arsenal
is prudent.

“I think we’re probably closer to
the kind of capabilities we’re talking
about than most people think, and
Russia and China are, too,” Latiff
says. “These are dangerous systems.
In the wrong hands, these things
could really be awful.”
A ban on autonomous weapons
would likely have little impact on the
development of weapons systems in
the near future, which still will be over-
seen by humans, even if the actual de-
cision to select and strike a target is
made by an autonomous system.

“An autonomous weapon operates
without human control, but that does
not mean that it is free from human in-
put,” Arquilla says. “There are a lot of
elements to the chain [of command];
the unfortunate term is the ‘kill chain.’
There will be people and machines in-
termixed within the chain.”
Whether or not a ban is put into
place, the international community is
likely to be faced with significant mor-
al and legal questions surrounding

“Once you introduce
swarms or you
have to respond
to adversary systems
that are autonomous,
humans in the loop
will create real
disadvantages.”

Milestones

Ken Kennedy Award Goes To Gropp

ACM and IEEE Computer Society named William D.

Gropp, Thomas M. Siebel Chair of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as recipient of the 2016 ACM/ IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his highly influential contributions to the programmability of high performance parallel and distributed computers.

Gropp was a leader in the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, the de facto standard for programming distributed-memory computers in scientific applications. and a key author in the development of MPI-I, MPI- 2, and MPI- 3. Gropp also designed and developed MPICH, the first functional implementation of MPI.

Along with collaborators David Keyes and Xiao-Chuan Cai, Gropp developed and analyzed key scalable parallel algorithms for adaptive mesh refinement and domain decomposition methods, which are now widely used in parallel applications. This led to the development of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), which Gropp developed in collaboration with Barry Smith. PETSc has been used in a variety of applications, including nano-simulations, biology, fusion, geosciences, environmental modeling, fluid dynamics, and software engineering, among others.

In 2011, Gropp helped launch the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC). He also served as the editor of CONNECT, the newsletter for SIGHPC; as chair of the Gordon Bell Prize Committee, and in various capacities for numerous conference committees.

Gropp, who also is Acting Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, has been elected an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, and is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Engineering.