Professor Sharkey, who said the oft-cited Hollywood example of killer robots in the Terminator film series was “unhelpful” in explaining the reality of the technology, said thought also had to be given to the risk of the weaponry falling into the hands of totalitarian regimes or terrorists.
Proponents of the technology argue that, if properly fettered by software so advanced that it could tell the difference, for example, between a large child with a toy gun and a small adult with an AK-47, it could have a role in future wars. A robot cannot rape, nor can it be motivated by cruelty or vengeance, and it can crunch data to avoid civilian casualties at a rate no human could compete with – or so the argument goes.
But opponents say the delivery of death by a machine violates the first law of robotics as laid out in 1942 by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov – that a robot’s primary duty is to protect humans – and even within the military, there are concerns that such scenarios cross a fundamental boundary.
A former US Air Force general made an impassioned plea earlier this year for action on a treaty to ban the killer machines. Major General Robert Latiff wrote: “Ceding godlike powers to robots reduces human beings to things with no more intrinsic value than any object. When robots rule warfare, utterly without empathy or compassion, humans retain less intrinsic worth than a toaster – which at least can be used for spare parts.”
Governments have not been deaf to such qualms. Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which is developing a “super-drone”, has acknowledged that autonomous weapons meeting legal requirements are theoretically possible, but says the development of such systems would be expensive and difficult.
The US Defence Department issued a directive last year requiring that the decision to deploy lethal force must always remain with a human. But Human Rights Watch warned: “The policy of self-restraint [the directive] embraces may also be hard to sustain if other nations begin to deploy fully autonomous weapons systems.”