IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 66

While Jenkins [10] argues that Stuxnet can be controlled, his own arguments fail to apply to any embedded
device in a human being. Still, he
acknowledges the largely untested
ethical domain of non-physical warfare that Stuxnet exemplifies.
Again this aspect of control via
embedded systems is not a trivial
question. Assistance to soldiers in
their primary function of war has
already extended to the use of ICE
(the drug) for attention enhancement, communications integration,
and visual enhancement [16], [19].
This list is steadily expanding. Head
Up Display (HUD) systems can now
be projected directly onto special
corneas: these may be removable
or implanted. There are few ethical
issues with a readily removable special contact lens, but very real issues
for a permanently implanted cornea
with modified function or that is in
some way instrumented or integrated with a remote communications
channel - and any tradeoffs for eye
function that are imposed.
Reversibility is a major issue. If the
enhancement (brain interface, etc.)
is removable without any residual
effects, one might assume that there
were few ethical issues involved
in its removal. But in the case of
military applications the effects on
the soldiers' behaviors [9] when an
enhanced capacity is lost has to be
assessed. In addition, the further
issue is the social response to soldiers when they are discharged and
returned into the community, if there
is any expectation of any enhancement remaining as a result of their
service, and of there being any
awareness by the community that
they have had had such treatments,
as the suspicion will always exist that
the enhancements are still there.
This is a social issue and an ethical
one for reentry into society - a question too rarely discussed in military
Rules of Engagement - and one

that might usefully be added under the
rubric "Rules of Disengagement"!
The blurring of civilian and military has further ethical consequences, especially when direct or indirect
"brain jacking" and manipulated
attitudes are involved:

general ignored as far as possible by
the military, leaving the soldiers themselves and the community to pay the
price. The price might be substantial
if enhanced warfighters are captured
and become subject to disassembly
to extract the enhancement devices
and interfaces themselves.
As long as these were the results
of the process of embedding (and
conditioning is undeniably that), the
questions could be deferred - but
not indefinitely.
Let us consider extensive embedding as providing a genuinely en hanced physical and reactive capacity.
Then we could perhaps "disarm"
the enhancements upon discharge.
Timothy Zahn in Cobra [21] illustrates
once again from the stance of science fiction framings the likely prices
to be paid by all parties. Precisely
this point is made 40 years later in
very recent explorations into the ethics of enhancement technologies for
warfighters, and is even now under
consideration for the ethical approval
of human enhancement technology
experiments as a whole [11].
Now let us move one step further,
to intellectual enhancements, collapse of perceptions and decision
lags, controlled locally or remotely.
These are all under active research
and experiment already.
What happens in the case of
these further steps? First the morals and ethics of the controller, the
solider, and the society now become
severely strained. Responsibility for
actions has to be spilt - not as now
betweenordersandcompliance - but
to ethical issues of consequences
and who is taking the price?
Society blindly attributes these
responsibilities to the physical actors.
This will no longer be accurate,
appropriate, or workable: we need to
work out how to handle these questions.
Second, if intellectual enhancements form part of the bundle, can
we morally disarm those who have

The ways in which military psychological resilience programming works to wage both war
and austerity in the fields of
social and inter/national security are significant because they
raise troubling questions about
the evolving status and ethics
of what it means to be a human
being [9].
Many measures taken to enhance
soldier efficiency extract a price in
terms of their personal humanity.
We are still coming to terms with the
results of soldier training and conditioning, but we have hardly begun
to address the consequences of
desensitization and the experiences
of inevitably traumatic events.
The experiences of Vietnam veterans in their various communities
post service have not been entirely
positive - especially when their
combat conditioning became apparent in cases of violent responses.
The civilian legal issues surrounding
highly trained martial arts specialists becoming capable of becoming
designated "lethal weapons" is relevant. Soldiers are necessarily specifically conditioned as part of their
training: martial arts specialists
choose to develop their lethal skills,
and most martial arts have a code of
conduct to limit their use on others.
The importance of these questions
will be amplified if enhancements
are left in place and functioning, as
enhancement of lethality (in some
form) is a major objective of military
enhancement in the first place. Some
of the existing condition processes
are not readily reversible, and are in
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march 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017