Britain needs robot soldiers, says former Navy head
UK being left behind in development of lethal autonomous weapons by its enemies, claims admiral
BRITAIN must develop lethal autonomous weapons or face being wiped out by enemies who have them, the former head of the Royal Navy has warned.
Admiral Sir George Zambellas, who was first sea lord and chief of the naval staff for three years from 2013, said that such weapons were an “inevitability” and that parts of the defence industry were already “extremely advanced at what may be possible”.
“People often say to me, ‘Isn’t that terrible? Machines will be fighting human beings in the most unbalanced way,’” he said.
“My answer is simple. It’s not what we can design and create, or what we think is ethical and legal [that matters]. It’s what the enemy does. The enemy will determine the future.” Asked if he thought lethal autonomous weapons would appear on battlefields within 20 years, he replied: “Definitely. Politicians abhor, as do the public, the loss of blood and treasure.
“We’ve seen that in recent wars. So there is an inclination towards unmanned systems.”
His comments, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph at an artificial intelligence (AI) summit at London Tech Week, follow a similar warning from Gen Sir Richard Barrons who, like Sir George, held senior rank – with the UK’S Joint Forces Command – until 2016.
Last year, Sir Simon Cholerton, chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence, said Britain considered fully autonomous weapons unethical and would not develop them.
Sir George, who is now at AI company Agorai, also said Britain was losing its world-class coding talent abroad “at an alarming rate”. This despite the fact that AI was “bigger even than the nuclear security investment that took place over decades in terms of its strategic importance to the nation”.
He complained that outdated thinking across government and the military risked Britain being overtaken by other nations.
“A lot of middle-aged politicians have little idea what they’re talking about,” he said. “A lot of senior military and politicians mutter about technology and AI and fail singularly to invest in it in anything like the necessary scale.
“The reason is simple: if you are a politician, you count tanks and ships. That’s a metric of your military authority. There’s a horrible truth to it.”
Liberal democracies such as Britain, he said, were “massively disadvantaged” when it came to long-term projects like preparing for AI.
Sir George said: “It takes autocratic leadership in Russia and China, or arguably less autocratic but very concentrated leadership in the US, to leverage a continuity of investment and time, people and money to make changes stick.”