Ethics Of Autonomous Warfare

The Ethics of Autonomous Warfare

Modern warfare is potentially catastrophically devastating to humanity. There already exist weapons of such power that the world could be reduced to rubble if these weapons were ever used in all out war. After World War I international agreements banned the use of chemical weapons because of their horrible effects on soldiers and civilians in that war. Today nuclear weapons, many times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have never been used.

Now, because of rapid advances in artificial intelligence a new class of weapons may soon be deployed unless the world powers agree in conventions to both forbid their deployment and treat violations as crimes against humanity.

The advancement toward fully autonomous warfare poses unacceptable moral and technical risks that make their deployment potentially devastating to future generations. While it is true that partially autonomous weapons, such as drones, are deployed today, a human operator has control of targeting.

The first argument against the use of fully autonomous weapons must be a moral one. By excluding humans from active control we would be accepting the choices of “machine intelligence” for life and death decisions.

As of now, warfare is seen as a terrible thing that we should avoid for the sake of saving human life. However, there is a looming problem of the possibility of mass production of “killer robots”. Without international conventions and sanctions countries such as North Korea or even Russia might pursue such a development. In the environment of war it is not uncommon to use enemy technology against them. Who’s to say that a enemy country wouldn’t just use Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs) to disable the robots, only to use them for themselves. By deploying these robots we are only giving the enemy an opportunity to use them against us, possibly even more technologically