Will robotic killers recognise surrender flags?

Adapted extract from an article by Jim McClellan in the Observer (April 2nd '95) entitled 'Evolution through a robot's eyes' which discusses the book War in The Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel de Landa (MIT Press, £15-25).

War in The Age of Intelligent Machines takes the viewpoint of a robot historian in the future tracing the history of the development of his own kind.

Manuel de Landa explores, inter alia, the ethical problems in creating rudimentary 'killer robots'. For example, when you have armies of predatory machines, what happens to the convention of waving a white flag to surrender? If you programme your killer robots to stop fighting when it appears, then all a clever human has to do to disable your techno-army is wave a white flag.

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