Solutions
What solutions are available?
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Position
We do not need to be resigned to an inevitable future with Slaughterbots. The global community has successfully prohibited classes of weaponry in the past, from biological weapons to landmines.
As with those efforts, the International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC) recommends that states adopt new legally binding rules to regulate lethal autonomous weapons.
Importantly, the ICRC does not recommend a prohibition of all military applications of AI – only of specific types of autonomous weapons. There are many applications of military AI already in use that do not raise such concerns, such as automated missile defense systems.
The ICRC Position
The ICRC is recommending three core pillars:
1: No human targets
Prohibition on autonomous weapons that are designed or used to target humans (“Slaughterbots”).
2: Restrict unpredictability
Prohibition on autonomous weapons with a high degree of unpredictable behaviour.
3: Human control
Regulations on other types of autonomous weapons combined with a requirement for human control.
Their full position can be found here:
Global debate
What is the current debate around lethal autonomous weapons?
UN CCW - ‘Road to Nowhere’
The United Nations' Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva has been discussing lethal autonomous weapons since 2013. That year they set up informal ‘Meetings of Experts’ to address what was then an emerging issue. In 2016, this was formalised into a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) to develop a new ‘normative and operational framework’ for states’ consideration. Three years later, the CCW adopted the GGE’s suggested eleven guiding principles.
In 2021 the world saw the first uses of lethal autonomous weapons in combat. If it had not been already, the need for a legally binding protocol was now self-evident. So, when the landmark CCW Review Conference of December 2021 could not even agree to start negotiating a protocol, the Convention was widely seen as ‘having failed’.
The GGE has since stalled without further progress. In July, the majority delegations got behind a promising draft - which was then stripped of all that promise by a persistent, blocking minority. By now, as Ray Acheson, Director of Disarmament at the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) put it, the CCW has proven itself to be a ‘road to nowhere’.
Almost ten years since these discussions began, autonomous weapons are spreading fast, yet they remain unregulated. The world can no longer afford to wait for this Convention to get something done. States must find another forum through which to reach a protocol.
Our Common Agenda - The Future of the United Nations
The U.N. Secretary General presented a 25-year vision for the future of global cooperation, and reinvigorated inclusive, networked, and effective multilateralism, at the 2021 General Assembly. This report identifies "establishing internationally agreed limits on lethal autonomous weapons systems" as key to humanity's successful future.