Russia Says It Will Ignore Any UN Ban of Killer Robots (ibtimes.com)

According a report from Defense One, a United Nations meeting in Geneva earlier this month on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) was derailed when Russia said they would not adhere to any prohibitions on killer robots. "The U.N. meeting appeared to be undermined both by Russia's disinterest in it and the framework of the meeting itself," reports International Business Times. "Member nations attempted to come in and define what LAWS' systems would be, and what restrictions could be developed around autonomous war machines, but no progress was made." From the report: In a statement, Russia said that the lack of already developed war machines makes coming up with prohibitions on such machines difficult. "According to the Russian Federation, the lack of working samples of such weapons systems remains the main problem in the discussion on LAWS... this can hardly be considered as an argument for taking preventive prohibitive or restrictive measures against LAWS being a by far more complex and wide class of weapons of which the current understanding of humankind is rather approximate," read the statement.

Comments

Just like anything the UN manadates

[Virtucon]

If a nation truly wants to ignore the UN, it can ignore it. The repercussions for Russia are negligible because they're on the Security Council as a permanent member, they'll veto any resolutions that have any teeth attempting to sanction them.

Re:Just like anything the UN manadates

[crunchygranola]

China is still a permanent member. It was never kicked off at any time.

What did happen was that the UN switched which government was recognized as representing the state of China. Instead of considering the government of the island of Taiwan as representing the entire nation of China, in 1971 the UN switched to recognizing the government of the entire nation of China, except Taiwan. But there has always been a permanent seat for China.

Re:Just like anything the UN manadates

[Anonymous Coward]

If every country agrees to not honor their veto they are essentially kicked off.
Another way could be for everyone else to start a new UN with blackjack and hookers.

Either way would be contrary to the purpose of the UN.

The UN is often described as toothless because of the veto situation, but it was created in a political climate where countries would stop talking to each other and go to war instead.
The purpose of the UN is to have a forum where dialogue can continue between counties even during a world war so that there at least is a chance to resolve matters without killing everyone.
For that to be possible it is necessary that those counties feel that it doesn't put them at disadvantage.
The veto ensures a toothlessness that is necessary for UN to perform its function.

For a similar reason you often see members of the Human Rights Council that you would typically not associate human rights.
The purpose of this is to put them in a position where they have to assign a person that has to take a lead in improving human rights and they will do so from the perspective of their own culture.
This does a lot more to help their people than someone from another culture on the other side of the planet telling them what they should do.

There might be a need for an organization that plays harder with misbehaving countries, but it would be a mistake to transform UN into that organization because then it wouldn't be able to fulfill its current role.

Re:Just like anything the UN manadates

[alvinrod]

You act like that's a bad thing. If anything were binding you'd see plenty of states trying to use the UN as a cudgel, as in "Me and this army" types of approaches. Most countries don't have the political will for such things to begin with and even if enough did, the UN would tear itself apart in short order and likely lead to large scale conflict, the type of thing it was meant to prevent.

It's far better that it's utterly toothless. At least it allows the world's countries to come together and air their grievances before everyone else.

Translation: They have a LAW program nearly ready

[raymorris]

It almost sounds like Russia might not want to ban the weapon they have been developing. Or, the headline and summary are complete bullshit. That happens a lot on Slashdot, misleading clickbait headlines.

Re:So in other words...

[Waffle Iron]

I'm guessing the Russians aren't even going to bother building these robots themselves.

The Russians might just wait until the US creates an army of killer robots, then hack into them and turn them against their owners. This strategy has already worked great when it was applied to our election system.

Re:If only we relied on good old fashioned dumb bo

[Anonymous Coward]

The only difference between a cruise missile and a drone is that the drone comes back. I'm not really sure what the uproar over killer drones are.

Then pay closer attention to the word "autonomous". Both the cruise missile and the drone have a human being who decides what the target is. An *autonomous* drone picks its own target.

Too Late

[Anonymous Coward]

There already are "killer robots". What do you call a Tomahawk cruise missile that can fly hundreds of miles and independently identify it's target then dive in and blow up. What do you call an AEGIS cruiser in full "auto" mode that identifies threats and fires off missiles as required to neutralize them. The only thing worth discussing is exactly how much automation would be permitted.

Re:Too Late

[mrwireless]

Samsung sells the SGR-A1 machine gun sentry bot that has a fully autonomous mode, meaning it kills anything that comes in front of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

South Korea uses it at the border with North Korea.

Shocked I say . SHOCKED !

[nehumanuscrede]

Show of hands . . . .

Who here believes ANY COUNTRY is going to adhere to a " terminator " ban ?

I'm pretty sure none of them will. . . . . they just won't be as blatant about it :D