Robots

Robots in war: the next weapons of mass destruction?

We’re all familiar, in varying degrees, with three pieces of modern technology:

1. The self-driving car: You tell it where to go and it chooses a route and does all the driving, “seeing” the road through its onboard camera.

2. Chess software: You tell it to win and it chooses where to move its pieces and which enemy pieces to capture.

3. The armed drone: You fly it remotely through a video link, you choose the target, and you launch the missile.

A lethal autonomous weapon might combine elements of all three: imagine that instead of a human controlling the armed drone, the chess software does, making its own tactical decisions and using vision technology from the self-driving car to navigate and recognize targets.

In the UK – one of at least six states researching, developing and testing fully autonomous weapons – the Ministry of Defence has said that such weapons areprobably feasible now for some aerial and naval scenarios.