U.N. TO HOST TALKS ON

Those hoping for a ban will be disappointed, says Indian envoy on disarmament

GENEVA

HOPE SOLO, US women’s football star

They argue that any weapons system that delegates the decision on an individual strike to an algorithm is by definition illegal, because computers cannot be held accountable under international humanitarian law.

Gill said there was agreement that “human beings have to remain responsible for decisions that involve life and death”.

But, he added, there were varying opinions on the mechanics through which “human control” must govern deadly weapons.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is mandated to safeguard the laws of conflict, has not called for a ban, but has underscored the need to place limits on autonomous weapons.

“Our bottom line is that machines can’t apply the law and you can’t transfer responsibility for legal decisions to machines,” Neil Davison of the ICRC’s arms unit said.

He highlighted the problematic nature of weapons that involved major variables in terms of the timing or location of an attack: for example, something that is deployed for multiple hours and programmed to strike whenever it detects an enemy target.

“Where you have a degree of unpredictability or uncertainty in what’s going to happen when you activate this weapons system, then you are going to start to have problems for legal compliance,” he said.

The UN meeting will also feature wide-ranging talks on artificial intelligence, triggering criticism that the CCW was drowning itself in discussions about new technologies instead of zeroing in on the urgent issue.

“There is a risk in going too broad at this moment,” said Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch, coordinator of CSKR.

“The need is to focus on lethal autonomous weapons,” she said.

The open letter co-signed by Musk as well as Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, warned that killer robots could become “weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways”.

“Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” they said. AFP

REUTERS PIC A scene from the movie, ‘Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines’, released in 2009. In August, more than 100 artificial intelligence entrepreneurs led by Tesla’s Elon Musk urged the United Nations to enforce a global ban on fully-automated weapons.