As many as 117 states party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) will attend the four-day meeting of experts to discuss the legality and moral issues surrounding killer bots.
Robots that can locate and kill enemies on their own are becoming a reality and the UN has raised concern over the technology lately.
Meet SGR-A 1 for example—a military robot designed to police the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. The all-weather robot fitted with a 5.56 mm automatic machine gun tracks multiple moving targets via infrared sensors and can identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles away.
Christof Heyns, the UN's Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in his report to the UN Human Rights Council called for a global pause in the development and deployment of LARs, to allow serious and meaningful international engagement on this issue before proceeding to a world where machines are given the power to kill humans.
Several nations including the US, UK, South Korea, Russia and Israel are believed to be at an advanced stage of developing killer robots.
Heyns pointed out that while drones still have a human in the loop, who takes the decision to use lethal force, LARs have on-board computers which decide who should be targeted.
LARs may make it easier for states to go to war and raises the question whether they can be programmed to comply with the requirements of international humanitarian law, especially the distinction between combatant and civilians and collateral damage.
The high level meeting next week will begin with a debate between roboticists professor Noel Sharkey, chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), and professor Ron Arkin from Georgia Tech.
Prof Sharkey has long expressed concern that autonomous weapons systems cannot be guaranteed to predictably comply with international law and stresses that the weapons must remain under human control.
Prof Arkin has argued for the development of an "ethical governor" software to ensure "ethical adherence" by autonomous systems capable of lethal action in narrowly-bounded circumstances. During the legal session, the campaign against killer robots will make the case that fully autonomous weapons are unlikely to be able to comply with international humanitarian law and that a preemptive ban is needed.
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