“Machines that have the power and discretion to take human lives without human control are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be banned by international law. I reiterate my call for the conclusion of a legally binding instrument by 2026.”
These were the words of UN Secretary General, António Guterres, in addressing a consultation on Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) this week. The two day consultation, the first of its kind in a forum open to all members of the United Nations, was called for by the UN General Assembly last year. Unfortunately, the consultation has fairly limited interest from the UK government (see below).
There is a danger that the technological capabilities to support autonomous weapons are advancing so fast that they are getting ahead of international agreement on ethics. Ambassador Maritza Chan-Valverde, Chair of the UN First Committee on Disarmament warned that “History has consistently shown that it is far more effective to ban or regulate weapons technologies before they are deployed by militaries at scale. In the case of autonomous weapons, we must write the rules before the algorithms write them for us.”
In the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) forum that meets regularly in Geneva, some progress has been made on technical matters such as defining levels of human control of autonomous weapons. However, this group of the world’s major states and exporters of weapons has ultimately failed to agree regulation, as the process in the CCW requires the support of every single member. Private sector developers and potential users of autonomous weapons are more likely to take notice of an international treaty, than a set of guidelines produced by the meetings of the CCW Group of Government Experts (GGE). An international treaty must now be our aim.
There are certain aspects of the use of autonomous weapons that are so worrying there is widespread public support for a complete ban. A primary concern are robots that identify people (rather than objects or military equipment) as either enemy or friend, combatant or civilian, and make a decision to kill. In New York on Tuesday, Elizabeth Minor of the advocacy group Article 36 (and who is well known to the Joint Public Issues Team) spoke on this aspect. She pointed out that robots that target people would inevitably and unavoidably reproduce the biases and discrimination like sexism, racism and ableism against minorities and marginalised groups in our societies, and called for complete prohibition of such weapons.
We continue to call on the UK Government to show leadership and support a new international law on autonomous weapons systems. Unfortunately, our government currently opposes such a move, preferring instead technical discussions in the closed and sadly deadlocked forum of the CCW. The UK government’s support for this week’s United Nations consultation is, maybe, an indication of greater openness. Joining with Christian and other faith traditions across the globe, we invite people to ask their MPs to urge our government to urgently support a new international treaty to ban autonomous weapons that target humans.
For more on the UK Government position see this appeal and this letter from the UK Campaign to Stop Killer Robots