Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners
'Autonomous weapons', which could be ready within a decade, pose grave
risk to international law, claim activists
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* The Observer <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/> , Saturday 23
February 2013 21.52 GMT
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[A scene from the 2003 film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines] A scene
from the 2003 film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Scientists say
killer robots are not science fiction. Photograph: Observer
A new global campaign to persuade nations to ban "killer robots
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/robots> " before they reach the
production stage is to be launched in the UK by a group of academics,
pressure groups and Nobel peace prize laureates.
Robot warfare and autonomous weapons, the next step from unmanneddrones
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/drones> , are already being worked on
by scientists and will be available within the decade, said Dr Noel
Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and
professor at Sheffield University. He believes that development of the
weapons is taking place in an effectively unregulated environment, with
little attention being paid to moral implications and international law.
The Stop the Killer Robots campaign will be launched in April at the
House of Commons and includes many of the groups that successfully
campaigned to have international action taken against cluster bombs and
landmines. They hope to get a similar global treaty against autonomous
weapons.
"These things are not science fiction; they are well into development,"
said Sharkey. "The research wing of the Pentagon in the US is working on
the X47B [unmanned plane] which has supersonic twists and turns with a
G-force that no human being could manage, a craft which would take
autonomous armed combat anywhere in the planet.
"In America they are already training more drone pilots than real
aircraft pilots, looking for young men who are very good at computer
games. They are looking at swarms of robots, with perhaps one person
watching what they do."
Sharkey insists he is not anti-war but deeply concerned about how
quickly science is moving ahead of the presumptions underlying the
Geneva convention and the international laws of war.
"There are a lot of people very excited about this technology, in the
US, at BAE Systems, in China, Israel and Russia, very excited at what is
set to become a multibillion-dollar industry. This is going to be big,
big money. But actually there is no transparency, no legal process. The
laws of war allow for rights of surrender, for prisoner of war rights,
for a human face to take judgments on collateral damage. Humans are
thinking, sentient beings. If a robot goes wrong, who is accountable?
Certainly not the robot."
He disputes the justification that deploying robot soldiers would
potentially save lives of real soldiers. "Autonomous robotic weapons
won't get tired, they won't seek revenge if their colleague is killed,
but neither will my washing machine. No one on your side might get
killed, but what effect will you be having on the other side, not just
in lives but in attitudes and anger?
"The public is not being invited to have a view on the morals of all of
this. We won't hear about it until China has sold theirs to Iran. That's
why we are forming this campaign to look at a pre-emptive ban.
"The idea is that it's a machine that will find a target, decide if it
is the right target and then kill it. No human involvement. Article 36
in the Geneva Convention says that any new weapon has to take into
account whether it can distinguish and discriminate between combatant
and civilian, but the problem here is that an autonomous robot is not a
weapon until you clip on the gun."
At present, Sharkey says, there is no mechanism in a robot's "mind" to
distinguish between a child holding up a sweet and an adult pointing a
gun. "We are struggling to get them to distinguish between a human being
and a car. We have already seen utter incompetence in the use of drones,
operators making a lot of mistakes and not being properly supervised."
Last November the international campaign group Human Rights Watch
produced a 50-page report, Losing Humanity: the Case Against Killer
Robots <http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity-0> ,
outlining concerns about fully autonomous weapons.
"Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the
battlefield would take technology too far," said Steve Goose, arms
division director at Human Rights Watch. "Human control of robotic
warfare is essential to minimising civilian deaths and injuries."
US political activist Jody Williams, who won a Nobel peace prize for her
work at the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, is expected to join
Sharkey at the launch at the House of Commons. Williams said she was
confident that a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons could be achieved
in the same way as the international embargo on anti-personnel
landmines. "I know we can do the same thing with killer robots. I know
we can stop them before they hit the battlefield," said Williams, who
chairs the Nobel Women's Initiative.
"Killer robots loom over our future if we do not take action to ban them
now," she said. "The six Nobel peace laureates involved in the Nobel
Women's Initiative fully support the call for an international treaty to
ban fully autonomous weaponised robots."
