‘Terminator’ on hold? Debate to stop killer robots takes global stage
nbcnews.com
Nidhi Subbaraman
A proposal to pause the development of “killer robot” technology is seeing a surge of interest from robotics researchers as well as the representatives of key nations at the United Nations this month.
At a UN General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security side event Monday, mission delegates from Egypt, France, and Switzerland voiced an interest in regulating “killer robots” — completely autonomous weapon systems — in warfare. They are some of the first international voices backing ideas that the Human Rights Watch and Campaign to Stop Killer Robots have been championing for about a year.
But before deliberations about regulating killer robots can take place, experts say they want more transparency from governments already using semi-autonomous systems, like the Phalanx naval weapon system, that to a degree can fire on their own, without a human “pulling the trigger.”
“We are not luddites, we are not trying to stop the advance of robotics,” Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and one of the panelists at Monday’s UN event, said. But, “I don’t want to see robots operating on their own, armed with lethal weapons.”
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots launched in April this year, and calls for a ban on weapon systems that can make target and kill decisions without a human “in the loop.” The launch followed a detailed report published by the HRW on the dangers of future “killer robot” technologies. Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur, presented a report on lethal autonomous weapons at the UN Human Rights Council in June this year. In it, he called for a ban on “certain aspects” of killer robots, and encouraged policy discussion about how to regulate them, at a national and international level.
And one future forum for discussion has been proposed. Anais Laigle, First Secretary and representative from the France Permanent Mission to the UN, said Monday that killer bots will be “included in the agenda” at the Convention on Conventional Weapons in November this year, a meeting chaired by France.
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Source: http://www.oneworldchronicle.com/?p=17914
