On Monday April 13, ICRAC guest Dr. Mark A. Gubrud delivered the following statement to the informal meeting of experts at the United Nations in Geneva. International Committee for Robot Arms Control opening statement to the Convention on Conventional Weapons Meeting of Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems, United Nations Geneva 13 April 2015 I am…
The short answer is no. But Russia is testing and may deploy at its ICBM bases a lethal mobile system which has “automatic and semi-automatic control modes.” Additionally, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has recently called for “robotic systems that are fully integrated in the command and control system, capable not only to gather intelligence…
At the ongoing CCW experts’ meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in Geneva, questions have begun to be raised about the verifiability of a ban on autonomous weapon systems. We would like to highlight the existence of our working paper outlining compliance measures for a ban, including a framework proposal as to how compliance could be…
One of Joshua Foust’s assertions in his debate with Heather Roff was that making weapons autonomous was necessary in order to secure them against the threat of hacking. I posted a response after Foustreiterated this surprising argument, and provided a few scraps of pseudo-evidence to support it, in an article which seems to have gone semi-viral on the internet–launching what seems…
New York Times science writer John Markoff reported on Sept.23 that the US military “lags” in development of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), which is sort of true if you compare the status of UGVs with that of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). The real reason, as Markoff acknowledges, has to do with the technical difficulty of locomotion on…
In November 2012, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed directive 3000.09, establishing policy for the “design, development, acquisition, testing, fielding, and … application of lethal or non-lethal, kinetic or non-kinetic, force by autonomous or semi-autonomous weapon systems.” Without fanfare, the world had its first openly declared national policy for killer robots. The policy has…
ForeignPolicy.com blogger Joshua Foust announced on May 14 that he’d identified a “liberal” case for killer robots, including the seemingly incompatible assessments that they could “do it better”, where “it” means make the decision to kill, and that they are but a “phantom” (therefore not demanding of a serious response, such as discussion of a treaty). Foreign Policy has…
On Nov. 21, as news of Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) “Losing Humanity” report was spreading, the Department of Defense quietly released Directive 3000.09 “for the development and use of autonomous and semi-autonomous functions in weapon systems”, making the United States the first nation to have an official policy statement on autonomous weapon systems (AWS). The…
I want to share a personal perspective, which has not been endorsed by ICRAC. I hope to stimulate further discussion on the foundations and framing of the nascent global campaign against autonomous weapons (AW, or systems, AWS). This essay is written to be constructively provocative. Two years ago, in presenting the first version of what…
The Associated Press reports that an “on-the-ground investigation” it conducted in North Waziristan of “10 of the deadliest [drone] attacks in the past 18 months” found that “of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent – at least 138 – were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police,”…