In a recent report for The Centre for a New American Security, a Washington based Defence Think Tank,
autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre drew an important distinction between existing, semi-autonomous and automatic weapons systems and hypothetical
autonomous weapons systems of the future.
In international discourse, most references to targeting are actually to target recognition, focusing on the ability of the
autonomous weapon to differentiate combatants from noncombatants.
Human-on-the-Loop, or human-supervised
autonomous weapon systems,
The use of
autonomous weapon systems under circumstances where all or almost all of the potential targets are lawful, or have already been vetted, may arguably also provide humanitarian benefits.
READERS MAY HAVE seen last month there was a lot of media coverage of a letter on
autonomous weapons sent to the United Nations Conference on Conventional Weapons (CCW) from 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies in 26 countries.
Many nations, including the United States, will place limits on the use of lethal
autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) to avoid the risk of collateral damage and to comply with international humanitarian law.
(27) To the list that is mentioned by Meagan Burke and Loren Persi-Vicentic, I add
Autonomous Weapon Systems.
In order to meet the requirement of proportionality,
autonomous weapons could be designed to be conservative in their targeting choices: When in doubt, don't attack.
Autonomous weapon systems are fundamentally different from prior forms of weaponry: their capacity for self-determined action makes them uniquely effective and uniquely unpredictable.
Lawful
autonomous weapon systems are defined in our analysis as
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), some experts believe that even if
autonomous weapons systems can be used in compliance with applicable jus in bello provisions, the penumbra of the Martens Clause as echoed in the CCW Preamble would constrain the use of machines making life and death decisions "with little or no human control." (38) In its official statement to the May 2014 meeting of experts in Geneva, the ICRC extended this sentiment to conclude that "perhaps the most fundamental question is whether
autonomous weapon systems are compatible with the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.
"It is necessary to increase the exchange of expert knowledge on technologies such as 3D printing, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, robotics, the synthesis of the human face and
autonomous weapons", he underscored.