The United Nations will once again debate the legality of Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARs) in combat scenarios. The killer robots meeting is scheduled for April 13 in Geneva, and will debate a ban “on the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding” currently being urged by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School.
If keeping militaries from eliminating the tenuous safeguards offered by drone pilots and other “in-the-loop” human elements seems like a no-brainer, well, you haven’t met most of the countries in the world. Turns out that everyone except Pakistan, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, and the Vatican would prefer at least a handful of human-killing, autonomous robots in our future.
The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
The United Nations (UN) has this not-at-all ominous thing called The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (Hilarious Full Name: The Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects as amended on 21 December 2001). If Lethal Autonomous Robots are indeed banned, the amendments will be made to this UN Convention.
An agreement cobbled together by 50 war-like human states, the UN Convention is full of grim Strangelovian compromises like explicitly allowing booby-traps — defined as “any device… which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act” — so long as they’re not rigged to detonate around mine detectors.
Since this particular UN convention has that wonderful, catch-all, “certain conventional weapons” theme it has become a scratchpad for miscellaneous future war scenarios, such as the “Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons” (summary: anything goes, as long as the weapon doesn’t have “permanent blindness” as its only function).
Military Robots and the UN Convention
So far the imminent possibilities of killer Lethal Autonomous Robots hasn’t been able to generate even the macabre sort of corpse-sorting in which the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons specializes. But which countries were the most on the side of the killer robots?
Kudos goes the United States for their ineffectual black comedy material written into our Department of Defense Directive on Autonomy in Weapon Systems: “Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” That we had the balls to show up to last year’s UN Convention meeting and insist that sentence was a good model for worldwide policy sets the comedic stage.
But while the United States preferred to bushwhack the proceedings (even after everyone was careful to say how perfectly okay they are with our drone massacres), other countries were more openly hostile to the idea of a ban. Israel argued for the utility of autonomous robots with the capacity to kill people, while China and Russia stepped aside, secure in their knowledge that this deliberative body will never, ever side with humans against the robots. In fact, Russia has already got those murdering, metal bastards running around.
With groups like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control uniting to push UN members to take a stand against killer robots there is always the possibility that this year’s meeting will be different from last year's. But, based on the other smokescreen protections to be found in The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, even the best-case scenario seems unlikely to silence that gentle whirr of actuators as the automaton murderer levels its steady shooting arm at your face.
