On Thursday 16 September 2010, the Guardian reports on ICRAC’s meeting in Berlin on the rapid proliferation of military drone planes and armed robots and possible arms control measures to curb this development, quoting ICRAC’s Steve Wright: “We need a new treaty to limit proliferation. All the arms fairs now are selling UAVs. It’s naive…
Three days after the publication of the Human Rights Watch Report: Losing our Humanity: The case against killer robots, the US Department of Defence issued a directive that gave clearance for the development of autonomous weapons: weapons that once launched can select and engage targets without further intervention. Here is my response on the relationship…
UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon “energized” by students’ “serious discussions” on autonomous weapons systems In less than two weeks, diplomats from around the world will gather at the United Nations in Geneva to discuss potential global regulations on “lethal autonomous weapons systems” that would be able to select and attack targets without direct human control. But…
Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power?, Popular science asks, quoting ICRAC’s Noel Sharkey: As quickly as countries build these systems, they want to deploy them, says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield in England: “There’s been absolutely no international discussion. It’s all going forward…
Sunday 21 November 2010, the Observer reports on the technological development in unmanned systems, quoting ICARC’s Noel Sharkey. He … … says it is impossible for autonomous robots today to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants, a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. He also believes robots lack the subtle judgment to adhere to another humanitarian…
The New York Times has entered the discussion about the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Columnist Bill Keller has produced a well balanced article that looks at the pros and cons of a ban. For the ban, he notes that The arguments against developing fully autonomous weapons, as they are called, range from moral (“they…
