International ban on killer robots faces strong opposition
/Screen capture from Twitter
Will some countries be able to deploy a killer robot within a decade?
An international agreement banning artificial Intelligence (AI) killer robots that selects a target and destroys it on its own is facing strong backlash from countries including the U.S. and the U.K.
Several countries, including South Korea, the U.S. and the U.K., have developed and deployed semi-autonomous robots.
However, no country has fully developed and deployed what are officially termed “lethal autonomous weapons systems” because of an international ban on developing and possessing autonomous killer robots.
The international agreement reflects an awareness that lethal autonomous weapons systems could go out of control.
At the recent U.N. general assembly in New York, the U.S. and the U.K. expressed their willingness to ease the regulations as they try to retain their AI weapons. They said only “emerging” weaponry should be banned.
Several countries, including Germany, China and Japan, want to ban existing and emerging weapons systems.
“Laws could violate fundamental principles of human dignity by allowing machines to choose whom to kill -- for example they might be tasked to eliminate anyone exhibiting “threatening behavior,” said Professor Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkeley.
U.N. official Christof Heyns also warned, “If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons, then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in.”