International attempts to regulate the use of autonomous weapons, sometimes called “killer robots”, are faltering and may be derailed if such weapons are used in Ukraine and seen to be effective.
No country is known to have used autonomous weapons yet. Their potential use is controversial because they would select and attack targets without human oversight. Arms control groups are campaigning for the creation of binding international agreements to cover their use, like the ones we have for chemical and biological weapons, before they are deployed. Progress is being stymied by world events, however.
A United Nations’ Group of Governmental Experts is holding its final meeting on autonomous weapons from 25 to 29 July. The group has been looking at the issue since 2017, and according to insiders, there is still no agreement. Russia opposes international legal controls and is now boycotting the discussions, for reasons relating to its invasion of Ukraine, making unanimous agreement impossible.
“The United Nations process operates under a consensus mechanism, so there is no chance for a blanket ban on autonomous weapons,” says Gregory Allen at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in DC. Yet there could still be a way for progress, he says, through the widespread adoption of a code of conduct.
Such a code could be based on Directive 3000.09, the first national policy on autonomous weapons, which was introduced in the US in 2012. This is being revisited under a Pentagon requirement to revise rules every 10 years.
Allen says Directive 3000.09 is widely misunderstood as outlawing autonomous weapons in the US. It actually sets out criteria such weapons have to meet and a demanding approval process, with the aim of risk to friendly forces or civilians.
Allen says the extensive use in Ukraine of radio-frequency jamming, which breaks contact between human operators and drones, will increase the interest in autonomous weapons, which don’t need a link to be maintained.
Allen also says the review of the directive probably won’t change much, but may add details on issues like machine learning and when advances require a system to be reassessed.
The US Department of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment before publication.
In the absence of binding international laws or codes of conduct, autonomous weapons will continue to develop.
The policy developed by the AI after this training generally tried to reduce wealth disparities between players by redistributing public money according to how much of their starting pot each player contributed. It also discouraged free-riders by giving back almost nothing to players unless they contributed approximately half their starting funds.
When there was the highest inequality between players at the start, a “liberal egalitarian” policy which redistributed money according to the proportion of starting funds each player contributed, but didn’t discourage free-riders proved as popular as the AI proposal, by getting more than 50 per cent of the vote share in a head-to-head contest.
The DeepMind researchers do raise concerns about an AI-powered “tyranny of the majority” situation in which the needs of people in minority groups are overlooked.
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