UN fails to agree on ‘killer robot’ ban as nations pour billions into autonomous weapons research

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly generally known as killer robots – can have killed human beings for the primary time ever last 12 months, in keeping with a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well discover this as the start line of the following major arms race, one which has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the query of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated frequently to limit a few of the world’s cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that may operate independently, choosing and attacking targets and not using a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries world wide are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to ascertain regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, each because they may transform perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the chance of preemptive attacks, and since they could possibly be combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

As a specialist in human rights with a concentrate on the weaponization of artificial intelligence, I find that autonomous weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear world – for instance, the U.S. president’s minimally constrained authority to launch a strike – more unsteady and more fragmented. Given the pace of research and development in autonomous weapons, the U.N. meeting might need been the last probability to move off an arms race.

Lethal errors and black boxes

I see 4 primary dangers with autonomous weapons. The first is the issue of misidentification. When choosing a goal, will autonomous weapons have the ability to differentiate between hostile soldiers and 12-year-olds fidgeting with toy guns? Between civilians fleeing a conflict site and insurgents making a tactical retreat?

The problem here isn’t that machines will make such errors and humans won’t. It’s that the difference between human error and algorithmic error is just like the difference between mailing a letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot systems – ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across a complete continent – could make misidentifications by individual humans like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan appear to be mere rounding errors by comparison.

Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of the runaway gun to elucidate the difference. A runaway gun is a defective machine gun that continues to fireplace after a trigger is released. The gun continues to fireplace until ammunition is depleted because, so to talk, the gun doesn’t comprehend it is making an error. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately they’ve human operators who can break the ammunition link or attempt to point the weapon in a protected direction. Autonomous weapons, by definition, don’t have any such safeguard.

Importantly, weaponized AI needn’t even be defective to supply the runaway gun effect. As multiple studies on algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the absolute best algorithms – operating as designed – can generate internally correct outcomes that nonetheless spread terrible errors rapidly across populations.

For example, a neural net designed to be used in Pittsburgh hospitals identified asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; image recognition software utilized by Google identified Black people as gorillas; and a machine-learning tool utilized by Amazon to rank job candidates systematically assigned negative scores to women.

The problem isn’t just that when AI systems err, they err in bulk. It is that after they err, their makers often don’t know why they did and, due to this fact, the best way to correct them. The black box problem of AI makes it almost inconceivable to assume morally responsible development of autonomous weapons systems.

The proliferation problems

The next two dangers are the issues of low-end and high-end proliferation. Let’s start with the low end. The militaries developing autonomous weapons now are proceeding on the idea that they may have the ability to contain and control the usage of autonomous weapons. But if the history of weapons technology has taught the world anything, it’s this: Weapons spread.

Market pressures could end in the creation and widespread sale of what may be considered the autonomous weapon equivalent of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots which can be low cost, effective and almost inconceivable to contain as they flow into across the globe. “Kalashnikov” autonomous weapons could get into the hands of individuals outside of presidency control, including international and domestic terrorists.

High-end proliferation is just as bad, nevertheless. Nations could compete to develop increasingly devastating versions of autonomous weapons, including ones able to mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear arms. The moral dangers of escalating weapon lethality can be amplified by escalating weapon use.

High-end autonomous weapons are more likely to result in more frequent wars because they may decrease two of the first forces which have historically prevented and shortened wars: concern for civilians abroad and concern for one’s own soldiers. The weapons are more likely to be equipped with expensive ethical governors designed to attenuate collateral damage, using what U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has called the “myth of a surgical strike” to quell moral protests. Autonomous weapons may also reduce each the necessity for and risk to at least one’s own soldiers, dramatically altering the cost-benefit evaluation that nations undergo while launching and maintaining wars.

Asymmetric wars – that’s, wars waged on the soil of countries that lack competing technology – are more likely to turn out to be more common. Think in regards to the global instability brought on by Soviet and U.S. military interventions through the Cold War, from the primary proxy war to the blowback experienced world wide today. Multiply that by every country currently aiming for high-end autonomous weapons.

Undermining the laws of war

Finally, autonomous weapons will undermine humanity’s final stopgap against war crimes and atrocities: the international laws of war. These laws, codified in treaties reaching way back to the 1864 Geneva Convention, are the international thin blue line separating war with honor from massacre. They are premised on the concept that people may be held accountable for his or her actions even during wartime, that the suitable to kill other soldiers during combat doesn’t give the suitable to murder civilians. A distinguished example of somebody held to account is Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was indicted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

But how can autonomous weapons be held accountable? Who is accountable for a robot that commits war crimes? Who can be placed on trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier’s commanders? The corporation that made the weapon? Nongovernmental organizations and experts in international law worry that autonomous weapons will result in a serious accountability gap.

To hold a soldier criminally responsible for deploying an autonomous weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors would wish to prove each actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms describing a guilty act and a guilty mind. This can be difficult as a matter of law, and possibly unjust as a matter of morality, provided that autonomous weapons are inherently unpredictable. I imagine the gap separating the soldier from the independent decisions made by autonomous weapons in rapidly evolving environments is just too great.

The legal and moral challenge isn’t made easier by shifting the blame up the chain of command or back to the location of production. In a world without regulations that mandate meaningful human control of autonomous weapons, there will probably be war crimes with no war criminals to carry accountable. The structure of the laws of war, together with their deterrent value, will probably be significantly weakened.

A brand new global arms race

Imagine a world by which militaries, insurgent groups and international and domestic terrorists can deploy theoretically unlimited lethal force at theoretically zero risk at times and places of their selecting, with no resulting legal accountability. It is a world where the kind of unavoidable algorithmic errors that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now result in the elimination of whole cities.

In my view, the world shouldn’t repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear arms race. It shouldn’t sleepwalk into dystopia.