Robots

The Good, The Bad, And The Autonomous In Battle

Autonomous machines are developing at incredible rates, and we may soon find them fighting our battles for us. While the possibilities of technology keep expanding, they do raise some tricky ethical questions.

Representatives from more than 82 countries came together in Geneva earlier this year to discuss this issue, and after deliberations recommended that the “key UN body that sets norms for weapons of war should put killer robots on its agenda,” writes Eydar Peralta for NPR.

Some organisations, like Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, are urgently calling for a complete ban on autonomous killer robots before the technology crosses a “moral threshold,” in the words of Harvard Law School’s Bonnie Docherty. Docherty warns of a robotic arms race that can cloud the issues of responsibility.