Campaign calls to stop killer robots before they get started

The time to stop killer robots is before they're created, according to a new international coalition. Led by Human Rights Watch, a group of non-governmental agencies from around the world launched a campaign this week urging governments to ban something that has not yet come to pass.

Their chosen title — Campaign to Stop Killer Robots — may garner a few chuckles, but the mission is deadly serious and addresses a scenario that actually does sound more believable and less like it came out of a James Cameron script. According to their own website, they're "working for a ban on fully autonomous weapons (robotic weapons that would be able to choose and fire on targets on their own without any human intervention)."

[ Related: Campaigners call for ban on 'killer robots' ]

So how close are we to having this be an actual problem? The bad news is that we're a lot closer than you might think.

According to campaign spokesperson and professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, Noel Sharkey, the technology is available right now. "I think we are already there. If you asked me to go and make an autonomous killer robot today, I could do it. I could have you one here in a few days," he told reporters at the launch event in London, UK, according to Reuters.

The good news is, so far, robots that can decide for themselves whether to kill or not kill are still on the development table and not on the battlefield. If we placed them on the battlefield, not only would we have to rely on them to judge between a combatant and a civilian (and we've even had examples in science fiction about the problems with that) but, as Dr. Sharkey points out, there would also be the question of accountability as well. If the robot kills the wrong person, who is to blame? The robot? The robot's human handler (if it has one)? The robot's programmer or team of programmers?

These robots may not exist yet, but Dr. Sharkey is concerned nonetheless. Back in February, he told the Guardian, "These things are not science fiction; they are well into development. The research wing of the Pentagon in the US is working on the X47B [unmanned plane] which has supersonic twists and turns with a G-force that no human being could manage, a craft which would take autonomous armed combat anywhere in the planet."

"In America they are already training more drone pilots than real aircraft pilots, looking for young men who are very good at computer games," he added in the interview. "They are looking at swarms of robots, with perhaps one person watching what they do."

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Unfortunately for humanity, even if Skynet isn't on the immediate horizon, it seems as though The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots might not be as 'tinfoil hats' as it sounds. It's not jumping to the top of my list of things to worry about this weekend, but it's not going to my mental 'round-file', either.

You can read more about their take on the situation in the article Losing Humanity by group-leader Human Rights Watch.

(Image courtesy: Getty/Oli Scarff)

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