UN To Debate Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Hallie Siegel writes: Should robots be allowed to make life and death decisions? This will be the topic of heated debate at the United Nations (UN) Palais des Nations in Geneva next week (April 13-17th, 2015). As part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), experts from all over the world will gather to discuss 'questions related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems.' The Open Roboethics Research Initiative will be presenting public views at the debate. Human rights groups are urging the UN to ban such weapons. A new report titled "Mind the Gap" details the accountability issues that need to be solved before going any further. "A key concern with fully autonomous weapons is that they would be prone to cause civilian casualties in violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The lack of meaningful human control that characterizes the weapons would make it difficult to hold anyone criminally liable for such unlawful actions."

Comments

Re:better idea

[phantomfive]

Great idea. 2000 years ago they nailed someone to a tree for saying that. And I don't think the general attitude has changed that much.

Maybe. The number of deaths over time from war has dropped dramatically, not even adjusting for population growth.

Western Europe has managed to completely give up fighting each other, and that was after millennia of fighting each other. So in 2000 years a lot has improved.