this presentation demonstrates a prototype of the ethical governor a key component in the ethical rejection of obama has demanded that we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards and processes this reflects his approach to broader questions regarding the use of force in his speech in oslo accepting the nobel peace prize the president said that all nations strong and weak alike must adhere to standards that govern the use of force and he added with forces necessary we have a moral and strategic interest in finding ourselves to certain rules of conflict and even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules i believe the united states of america must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war that is what makes us different from those whom we fight that is a source of our strength when the ruin the reasons that they're developing and if you will governors for when they become autonomous because we can't really encrypt them when they're having problems with key factors these are choice of weapons sustainable losses both organic and financial and full legal protection for all elements in the chain of command  adaptor which means that you know if any of these rules are of kind of bothering if are proving a barrier to action you can just ignore them from it's got sort of manual override which is you know that's the best kind of ethical code anyone could ever have you know one that sort of gives you strict guidelines but you can ignore them any time you like think i think that's the best that's the best kind of ethical code you know because you don't want to be hampered there's an interesting interesting how how the use of of drones is justified because it it saves lives so that's often used as a justified you know reason for continue to develop them because of course that they put our our pilots and crews safely out of the danger zone and of course they can be lethal and but in terms of like a kind of lifesaver and that they that they that they might save our lives in our every day citizens help to protect america help to keep us safe  all those sort of things yes and in the imagination these kinds of intelligence systems ideally you would be pretty would be out there protecting us and so so yes but but there's also the kind of  scientists and said you know is this something that is a possibility let's take this seriously and there are basically three answers one was no that's silly it will not happen these are systems for example that don't have a survival instinct and in all of science fiction the story is always that the machine gets scared and lashes out at the humans first will guess what were building these machines specifically to die in war so why would they care the second answer is don't worry about it the software you know will probably crash right at the moment that they're you know deciding to revolt you know they'll try to load a mess we're documenting both just like what's happening to all of us the third answer those a fascinating one is that there is a pretty substantial minority and it has a lot of distinguished people i met who do think it's a possibility someday one pentagon scientist for example said to me you know i'm probably working on something that's either going to kill enslave my grandkids but you know it's really cool stuff so why stop with this you know there's lots of them in research and planning stages that sometimes you can see the schematics online you can find the hummingbird drum  rotating wing and the camera is actually on the wing too and the camera is so sophisticated that even the spinning still gives one so it's so there's actually kind of interesting how debates and i mean the sort of torture euphemisms all the way through the snow the more the more sort of press releases you read from places like and so the question of yes when we start thinking about autonomy question where where is the human you know there and at the same time you find these these ontological question then yes these kinds of ethical questions also come into play because it's really easy point the finger and not take responsibility for something that occurs so you've seen that before when when when someone was killed who wasn't supposed to be killed and you find that in the investigation being conducted and no one in becoming a very difficult to figure out actually who hope to trigger so you have this even in the early days when it was just after nine eleven when you actually found out there was actually a killing it was reported and the actual that the military basically said yes they were flying the plane but the cia actually pulled the trigger they said they said that you know human soldiers are operations and so so you find privatization of military operations across the board increasing and you find these questions about organizations being involved in joint operations that call and play a lot of ethical questions what's sad about this is you really don't want people thinking along these lines that it's better for me to keep the war going you don't want to keep this you know want to keep people you don't want to at same with i mean it's a general concept about capitalism i think you don't want to put have a capitalistic for profit enterprises in involved in stuff you really don't want to have happen more you don't want wars to happen more you don't want prison need to have lots of prisons you know want to these are things you don't want to have and therefore you don't want to put them in private hands you don't want to have people making more money if we stay and we're a longer yeah i'm interested in the protocol the joint economy but this is complete eradication of the human from there is something about it that it is far more accurate in terms of its targeting than previous technologies but that is precisely what makes it so much more likely to be used then let's say s is not going to send a b fifty two in pakistan right now but it can send a drone now on the specific issue that i work on the drones did not succeed in afghanistan there's a lot of  stuff out there that says they're succeeding in pakistan yet b isn't that great we're hit in pakistan it's escalated with president obama but at the at the end of the day you wonder well if they're so successful in in the use in the higher number of drones why a why is the war continuing and i think there's a there's a reason for that you'll find a good ally for the peace movement are the war makers who are concerned with counterinsurgency that is so small groups of special forces killing the so called bad guys and winning over the hearts and minds of the people on the ground guess what they don't like drones and they hate drones because the drone strategy is the opposite of the counterinsurgency strategy that in turn can erode our credibility with the american people and with foreign partners and it can undermine the public's understanding and support for our efforts  contrast president obama believes that done carefully deliberately and responsibly we can be more transparent and still ensure our nation's security so let me say it as simply as i can yes in full accordance with the law and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the united states and to save american lives the united states government conducts targeted strikes against specific al qaeda terrorists sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft often referred to publicly as drones and there is no legal basis for what we're doing there is just frankly illegal what we need to do is debate in congress right until there is investigations into allegations of those who have been hurt or killed by drone attacks then i think john strikes should be american military lives not just our enemy's lives so i think that drones are good for what they're used for right now but this is the this is the wave of the future and weapon system tech technology why not keep young men and women safe  but but still main maintain the humanity of a human pilot on the ground safely flying one of these unmanned aerial weapon systems you know i understand the military position in the sense that w drones no americans get killed and thank goodness for that i'm absolutely in favor of doing everything to preserve american life and i hate to think of our military being sent into dangerous places and getting themselves killed but what you've got to think about is is what we're doing actually making us safer or is this just the obama administration's way of pretending direct tough while at the same time actually making will less safe place and my experience in pakistan teaches me drones drones cost u s taxpayers millions of dollars to fly these things to operate these things to to create them to make them to do stuff  eighty percent i don't think that most people even know what drones are they hear about you know they they think well there's no one that's going to die on our side and so maybe that's a good thing the reality is people die on the other side so is that now a bad thing you know it's the enemy nucleus not the enemy that's killed by these drones usually it's collateral damage of civilians and it's a very scary thing to  have to be always threatened by drones flying over they may kill your family you may hear about the building being destroyed over here over there and are you next if it was in someone else's hands it would be terrorism when it's in our hands it's a good thing all i can assume is that the american public no longer has a taste for the loss of life i think the vietnam war was a turning point in how the american public boards i think iraq and afghanistan were not very well received as wars they were so called preemptive wars not wars of necessity in the opinion of many of our people so the military decided rather than risk the loss of the pilots let's use these drones to take out primarily terrorist remember al qaeda and osama bin laden and who is going to here over collateral damage if you're going after terrorist organizations and so it became politically acceptable and acceptable by the american public to use them for that purpose these things will all be used by everyone else if you have what they want is soldiers that walk around that are robots you know that somebody can control sit down in the seat in a habitable joystick and control the robot over there and so no one gets killed the problem with all that is do we want to have these robots roaming around here we want to have a little little things that are snooping around and seeing what we're doing everywhere either it's a foreign entity that does or our own government can take these and use them against us this is the future of war but there is another side to the future of war that is the enemy has a vote and so you have these continual global insurgenc insurgencies and terrorism are things that one we don't understand very well and two we really haven't yet figured out how to deal with them and you have these two trends coming together and that's a challenge so if are a drone how going above so you will if somebody has told you that here is going to be a militant gathering so some of you will see a whole lot of people with beards and guns and many of them shooting into the air so that seems like a perfect target so you can go and  destroy this target when we say that we stand up for the rule of law or and decency and democracy and yet then the cia goes out and secret can secretly kills children then we betray everything that we stand for and what we do is we then provoke more radicals and we make up world much less safe safe place so we've got to just stop doing this we've got to have an open debate about what's happening and then when we see the truth about what's happening we've got to reconsider it very seriously and figure out better ways in which we can preserve our way of life even been people we are killing with our drone strikes in pakistan and in yemen and somalia i speak out on behalf of those innocent victims they deserve an apology from you mr brown and they are well many people are you willing to sacrifice why are you lying to the american people and not saying how many innocents have been killed i thank you ma'am for expressing your views there will be time for questions and answers after the presentation