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International Human Rights Watch and civil organisations have taken their lobby to the United Nations (UN), calling for an international treaty banning fully autonomous weapons, also called killer robots.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is a global coalition of non-governmental organisations that have been working since April 2013 to pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons, also known as lethal autonomous weapons systems. South Africa is participating in the International Disarmament Initiative.
The campaign fundamentally objects to permitting machines to take human life on the battlefield (both currently and in future technology) or in policing, border control and other circumstances such as war drones that dominate modern day battlefronts and are used to assassinate leaders of rebel movements or terror groups.
“Governments should move to negotiate an international treaty banning fully autonomous weapons. Any lesser measures will be doomed to failure,” said Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch.
Wareham, who is the coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, spoke in Geneva where the lobby group presented their case at the weeklong fifth Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) at the UN that started on Monday April 9. The convention will end on April 13.
“To avoid a future where killer robots, not humans, call the shots, governments need to act now,” she added.
The NGO coalition said governments were running out of time to prevent the development of weapons systems that would select targets and attack on their own, without meaningful human control.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots called on the governments of the world to act on their undertaking made at the last CCW meeting in November 2017, where many states had expressed their strong desire to begin negotiating new international law.
Most agree with the need to retain some form of human control over future weapons systems and several say they have “no plans” to acquire or develop fully autonomous weapons. To date, 22 countries have unequivocally called for a ban on fully autonomous weapons, the campaign organisers said in a statement from Geneva.
“States should make it explicit that meaningful human control is required over individual attacks and that weapons systems that operate without such human control should be prohibited,” said Richard Moyes of Article 36, a United Kingdom-based NGO.
“For human control to be meaningful, the technology must be predictable, the user must have relevant information, and there must be the potential for timely human judgement and intervention,” Moyes added.
The group claimed that several autonomous weapons systems with decreasing levels of human control are currently in use and development by high-tech militaries including the United States of America, China, Israel, South Korea, Russia and the United Kingdom.
It further expressed concerns that a variety of available sensors and advances in artificial intelligence were making it increasingly practical to design weapons systems that would target and attack without any meaningful human control. It said if the trend towards autonomy continued, humans “may start to fade out of the decision-making loop for certain military actions, perhaps retaining only a limited oversight role, or simply setting broad mission parameters”.
In a briefing note issued in advance of the CCW meeting, the campaign urged states to identify the relevant “touchpoints” of human/machine interaction in weapons systems and explain how control would be applied over existing weapons systems, especially those with certain autonomous or automatic functions.
“Measures that fall short of a legally-binding treaty will be insufficient to prevent a future of killer robots,” said Miriam Struyk of PAX.
“We expect states to express their firm determination to avoid dehumanising the use of force by moving to negotiate new international law ensuring meaningful human control.”
France and Germany have proposed that the CCW conclude a non-legally binding political declaration to affirm that humans should “make ultimate decisions with regard to the use of lethal force and continue to exert sufficient control over the lethal weapons systems they use”.
A large group of Non-Aligned Movement states have called for the development of a “legally binding international instrument stipulating prohibitions and regulations on lethal autonomous weapons systems”.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is calling on states to conclude a legally binding instrument prohibiting the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapons systems by the end of 2019. Other diplomatic options, they suggested, should be explored if the CCW was not up to this task. They also encouraged states to quickly adopt national legislation banning fully autonomous weapons systems.
