The Duck of Minerva

Heather Roff

Senior Research Analyst at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Fellow at Brookings Institution and Associate Fellow at University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

Recent Posts

Swan Song – For Now

Swan Song – For Now

by Heather Roff | 7 September, 2017 | , ,

In some sense, it is with a heavy heart that I write my last permanent contributor blog post at the Duck.  I’ve loved being with the Ducks these past years, and I’ve appreciated being able to write weird, often off the track from mainstream political science, blogs.   If any of you have followed my work over the years, you will know that I sit at an often-uncomfortable division between scholarship and advocacy.  I’ve been one of the leading voices on lethal autonomous weapon systems, both at home in academia, but also abroad at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons,...

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Two legs or One. It has nothing to do with planets- just pants.

by Heather Roff | 26 July, 2017 | , , , ,

Sometimes when we look for a rallying call to join us as humans around a common cause or to show us our equal vulnerability, we say  these trite sayings like “ Common-sense says that all men put their pants on one leg at a time.” This is supposed to reassure us that we are all equal in the most “animalistic” of ways (because you know, animals wear pants). Here is the problem and the reality though: I cannot buy jeans that are not skinny jeans... shocking. What does that mean for the one-leg mantra? Well… as a woman- and a woman living in a world that tells most women that they have to be...

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Ethical Robots on the Battlefield?

Ethical Robots on the Battlefield?

by Heather Roff | 2 March, 2017 | , , , ,

Every day it seems we hear more about the advancements of artificial intelligence (AI), the amazing progress in robotics, and the need for greater technological improvements in defense to “offset” potential adversaries.   When all three of these arguments get put together, there appears to be some sort of magic alchemy that results in widely fallacious, and I would say pernicious, claims about the future of war.  Much of this has to do, ultimately, with a misunderstanding about the limitations of technology as well as an underestimation of human capacities.   The prompt for this round of...

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Trump and Truth: Or What Arendt Can Teach Us about Truth and Politics

Trump and Truth: Or What Arendt Can Teach Us about Truth and Politics

by Heather Roff | 14 February, 2017 | ,

Today’s revelation that Mike Flynn resigned from his post as National Security Advisor is another strong sign that the struggle between Truth and Politics is not a foregone conclusion.  Indeed, we ought to actually celebrate the fact that when Flynn lied about speaking with the Russian ambassador, and the lie was made public, he was forced to resign.  This victory notwithstanding, we still must be extremely vigilant against the Trump administration’s attack on Truth.  For the administration apparently knew that he lied some time ago, and it was only with increased public scrutiny that Flynn...

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Bannon’s Incoherent Vision of Disruption

Bannon’s Incoherent Vision of Disruption

by Heather Roff | 3 February, 2017 | , ,

In 2013, Bannon is reported to have told Ron Radosh of the Daily Beast that he was a Leninist.  He is quoted as saying “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too.  I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”   Yet this is such an odd thing to tell someone, particularly a journalist, when one’s very wealth, political power and caché depend on the very institution that he wants to destroy.  Lenin, after all, wanted to bring down capitalism and the bourgeoisie to usher in the proletariat as leaders of a communist government and society.  ...

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The Value Alignment Problem’s Problem

The Value Alignment Problem’s Problem

by Heather Roff | 10 January, 2017 | ,

Having recently attended a workshop and conference on beneficial artificial intelligence (AI), one of the overriding concerns is how to design beneficial AI.  To do this, the AI needs to be aligned with human values, and as such is known, pace Stuart Russell, as the “Value Alignment Problem.”  It is a “problem” in the sense that however one creates an AI, the AI may try to maximize a value to the detriment of other socially useful or even noninstrumental values given the way one has to specify a value function to a machine. As Russell explains:     The primary concern is not spooky...

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Algorithmic Bias: How the Clinton Campaign May Have Lost the Presidency or Why You Should Care

Algorithmic Bias: How the Clinton Campaign May Have Lost the Presidency or Why You Should Care

by Heather Roff | 1 December, 2016 | ,

This post is a co-authored piece: Heather M. Roff, Jamie Winterton and Nadya Bliss of Arizona State's Global Security Initiative We’ve recently been informed that the Clinton campaign relied heavily on an automated decision aid to inform senior campaign leaders about likely scenarios in the election.  This algorithm—known as “Ada”—was a key component, if not “the” component in how senior staffers formulated campaigning strategy.   Unfortunately, we know little about the algorithm itself.  We do not know all of the data that was used in the various simulations that it ran, or what its...

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Analogies in War: Marine Mammal Systems and Autonomous Weapons

Analogies in War: Marine Mammal Systems and Autonomous Weapons

by Heather Roff | 7 November, 2016 | , , ,

Last week I was able to host and facilitate a multi-stakeholder meeting of governments, industry and academia to discuss the notions of “meaningful human control” and “appropriate human judgment” as they pertain to the development, deployment and use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS).  These two concepts presently dominate discussion over whether to regulate or ban AWS, but neither concept is fully endorsed internationally, despite work from governments, academia and NGOs.  On one side many prefer the notion of “control,” and on the other “judgment.” Yet what has become apparent from many...

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Empathy, Envy and Justice: The Real Trouble for Algorithm Bias

Empathy, Envy and Justice: The Real Trouble for Algorithm Bias

by Heather Roff | 20 September, 2016 | , , , ,

Rousseau once remarked that “It is, therefore, very certain that compassion is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating the activity of self-esteem in each individual, contributes to the mutual preservation of the whole species” (Discourses on Inequality).  Indeed, it is compassion, and not “reason” that keeps this frail species progressing.   Yet, this ability to be compassionate, which is by its very nature an other-regarding ability, is (ironically) the different side to the same coin: comparison.  Comparison, or perhaps "reflection on certain relations" (e.g. small/big; hard/soft;...

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Improvised Explosive Robots

Improvised Explosive Robots

by Heather Roff | 11 July, 2016 | , ,

A common argument made in favor of the use of robotics to deliver (lethal) force is that the violence used is mediated in such a way that it naturally de-escalates a situation.  In some versions, this is due to the fact that the “robot doesn’t feel emotions,” and so is not subject to fear or anger.  In other strands, the argument is that due to distance in time and space, human operators are able to take in more information and make better judgments, including to use less than lethal or nonlethal force.  These debates have, up until now, mostly occurred with regards to armed conflict. ...

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