The Fifth Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), ended recently in Geneva with an interesting resolution that may have far reaching impact on the future of war. The parties to the conference agreed to establish a formal process, via a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), to kick-start talks on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) in 2017, with India as its chair.
LAWS, simply understood, are weapons that can be deployed without human intervention. While in popular imagination, such weapons are equated with Terminator style robots, they can include anything from such infantry replacing machines to smart missile defence shields. No country has yet deployed fully autonomous weapons, however given the current rate of technological development, the emergence of such weapon systems is bound to happen sooner or later.
This possibility has led to a growing number of people and institutions, including Elon Musk and the International Committee of the Red Cross, asking for a preemptive ban on the development and deployment of these weapons.
Two reasons are given for this. The first is moral. A number of commentators have argued that using LAWS places the decision to kill, always a weighty question, in the hands of machines. Given the sanctity of human life, this decision it is argued, must always rest with a human being. The second deals with compliance. The conduct of war today is governed by a host of international treaties, the compliance of which is often a subjective undertaking. Machines operating on pre-programmed codes and using objective criteria to make battlefield decisions, would not be able to comply in any substantial manner with these treaties.
Here also arises the question of liability. In case of any violations of these treaties, individual soldiers or their commanders can be held responsible for their actions. If an autonomous machine commits a war crime, where does the responsibility lie?
On the other hand, a number of people have pointed out that LAWS provide immense strategic and efficiency benefits that cannot be overlooked. Further, autonomy in weapon systems will in all likelihood be incremental and any pre-emptive ban may have a negative fallout on research in related fields, such as driver-less vehicles, which have significant civilian uses.
These positions are also split between smaller weapons importing countries, which have tended to advocate for a pre-emptive ban and larger, weapons exporting countries, which have been more circumspect on the issue.
Source :- Hindustan Times
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