Скачать или смотреть Lethal Autonomous Weapons (MHI)

BOTAS , MHI - This critical overarching debate to define lethal autonomous weapons also includes other important topics: Can these weapons be deployed with meaningful human control? Can they be used ethically and humanely? Do they need to be banned, or are they already regulated or illegal according to international humanitarian law (also known as the law of war)?

Essentially, the CCW is considering whether it’s ethical and legal for a machine or an algorithm to decide to kill a person. And if such a weapon could be ethical and legal, how much meaningful human control and oversight does it need?

The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Korea, and Australia are the countries most strongly opposing a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. In fact, Russia successfully advocated for decreasing the amount of time countries could even discuss the issue within the formal CCW setting, and 2019 became the first year in which countries will meet for seven days, rather than ten. Moreover, the CCW is consensus based. The group can’t move down any path unless every participating country is on board. So it’s possible for this handful of countries to prevent negotiations toward a ban indefinitely.

AI experts and tech leaders worry that once this genie is fully out of the bottle, there will be no stopping it. They insist that the weapons must be preemptively banned. If CCW discussions continue at their current pace, countries will miss this window for a preemptive ban.The current state of lethal autonomous weapons. Today, many weapons systems have autonomous capabilities. For example, precision-guided munitions can autonomously stay on target using a variety of technologies and sensors, but a person first decides what that target should be. Loitering munitions, like the IAI Harpy 2, are even more autonomous, as they can scout an area looking for unmanned targets, such as military radar signals, and can attack those targets. Then there are sentry guns, like the SGR-A1, which have been deployed along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. These weapons detect people using heat sensors. While SGR-A1s have an unsupervised mode that allows them to identify and fire against a target, they are currently only used in their supervised mode, notifying a human commander if they detect that a person has gotten too close. From there, the human overseeing the weapon decides what to do.

To be clear, none of these weapons have been used to autonomously target people. When lethal force is required by these weapons, human oversight is mandatory, and no one is advocating that these systems should be included in a lethal autonomous weapons ban. However, a handful of countries are pushing increasingly toward weapons systems that could soon cross the line from acceptable to unacceptable uses of automation and AI.

The European peace organization PAX recently released a report that highlights the activities of the seven countries with the most advanced AI and autonomous weapons programs–the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Korea, and France. The report highlights how each of these countries is ramping up the autonomous functions of their weapons.

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting military technological developments is that of swarm technology. Swarms of robots are exactly what they sound like: large numbers of robots working together to achieve some goal. Militaries are especially interested in this technology because it can add “mass” to the battlefield, without the need for more people. Swarms of tanks, planes, submarines, or even small drones, as anticipated in the fictitious Slaughterbots film, can attack multiple targets and, because of their numbers, they’re difficult for adversaries to stop.

DARPA describes this program as offering assistance to military personnel, rather than for launching attacks, but the step from reconnaissance and identifying targets to engaging with targets is not a big one. More importantly, taking that step is more about deciding how much human control should be involved in kill decisions, rather than overcoming technical limitations.

For now, all countries at the CCW have publicly stated that they intend to always ensure meaningful human control and oversight of their lethal weapons systems. The devil, however, is in the definitions.