Should we let robots kill on their own? [View all]

[Renew Deal]

Next week, from April 13th to April 17th, the second multilateral meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems is taking place at the United Nations in Geneva. At the meeting, AJung Moon, an executive member and co-founder of the Open Roboethics initiative (ORi), a think tank that aims to foster active discussions of ethical, legal, and societal issues of robotics will report on the preliminary results of a survey created by her team examining public attitudes toward autonomous weapon robots.

She’ll be joining a number of organizations supporting the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, whose primary objective is the pre-emptive ban on fully autonomous weapons. There are really only two outcomes on this issue — either the creation and spread of lethal autonomous weapons is banned or it isn’t. And by not banning them we’ll set a precedent that condones the moral and legal sovereignty of machines over our lives.

Once we approve the use of autonomous machines to kill without humans in the loop, we’re ceding what’s known as, “meaningful human control” for these systems. While the moral ramifications of war are certainly different than something like the manufacture of self-driving cars, once we’ve justified autonomous systems making life-and-death decisions, it’s easy to imagine our reliance on them for everything else.

“What we’re trying to do is demonstrate how the public feels about these issues,” noted Moon in our interview about her survey — which anyone can take — and upcoming meeting at the United Nations. “It’s something the UN has to consider when discussing the future of weapons systems at an international level.”
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Much more: http://mashable.com/2015/04/12/meaningful-human-control

Take the survey on Remote Operated Weapon Systems (ROWS) and Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems here (LAWS): https://survey.ubc.ca/s/militaryrobots2015/