As the dark clouds of conflict swirl across the globe, from Gaza to Ukraine and beyond, humanity is entering the so-called third era of warfare.
After the invention of gunpowder, then nuclear weapons, arms makers are now turning their attention to lethal autonomous weapon systems.
And, worryingly, these technological advancements are outpacing regulation.
So who’s going to stop the killer robots?
Mary Wareham is a global expert on autonomous weapon systems and the deputy director of the crisis, conflict and arms division at Human Rights Watch.
In 1997, she was a co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize for coordinating the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
And now, decades later, she’s advocating for a similar ban on these weapons as global coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
“These are inanimate machines that cannot comprehend the value of human life or the significance of its loss,” she tells ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas.
“So allowing them to make life and death determinations, it strips people who are being targeted of their human dignity, and in the process of determining who to kill, autonomous weapon systems boil human beings down to data points.”
Who is Mary Wareham?
In the 90s, Ms Wareham was at university in New Zealand, had joined the student activist movement and was writing her masters thesis on the implications of banning anti-personnel landmines.
This was at a time when landmines were one of the most commonly used weapons in the world.
Initally, Mary Wareham envisaged the campaign to ban landmines would take at least a decade but within 15 months a treaty was secured. (Supplied)
In 1996, Ms Wareham began working for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, where she assisted co-laureate Jody Williams in coordinating the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The world paid attention, and it only took 15 months for the Ottawa Convention or the international Mine Ban Treaty to be enacted.
So, are there similarities between the landmine campaign and current challenges?
“People will say to me today, ‘Oh, well, that was easy, that was landmines, killer robots is so much harder’,” Ms Wareham says.
However, it didn’t seem easy for the campaign to outlaw a weapon used by more than 100 countries and produced by more than 50 countries, she says.
“When that treaty was negotiated, there were millions [of landmines] in stockpiles, so it seemed like an insurmountable task,” she says.
Since the Mine Ban Treaty was introduced, throughout the world millions of mines have been destroyed and thousands of square kilometres of land have been cleared. (Getty: Vital Hil)
Yet, once the international framework and rules were in place, Ms Wareham says it was then possible to deal with the stockpile of landmines.
“I believe the same is possible for autonomous weapon systems,” she says.
What exactly are killer robots?
According to the 2012 Human Rights Watch report, ‘Losing Humanity — the case against killer robots’, lethal autonomous weapons are military systems that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions.
These include unmanned vehicles and military robots, unmanned ships and armed drones.
This weaponry can be classified into three groups depending on the level of human involvement:
- Human-in-the-loop weapons — robotic weapons directed by a human to select targets and deliver force
- Human-on-the-loop weapons — robots that have the oversight of a human operator who can override its actions
- Human-out-of-the-loop weapons — robots capable of selecting targets and delivering force without any human interaction
While autonomous weapon systems have existed for years, Ms Wareham says there have been limitations around the duration, geographic scope and environment in which they operate.
“More recently, we’re seeing humans-on-the-loop and the fear is that eventually, with the way that the technology is heading, humans might be out of the loop completely, and the machine will be taking the decision of who to fire [on], who’s a legitimate target and the kill decision,” she says.
While technically known as lethal autonomous weapon systems, Ms Wareham and her team at Human Rights Watch are responsible for the name “killer robots”.
“It certainly was a conversation starter, everybody wanted to know ‘What is a killer robot?’,” she says.
But not everybody is in favour of this name.
Kobi Leins, author of New War Technologies and International Law argues against the use of the term.
“It is problematic because these are not robots that have sentience or the ability to operate in the way that people sort of anthropomorphise them … What that’s done is deflected from real conversations about how the technology actually works,” she says.
How autonomous are these systems really?
According to Ingvild Bode, associate professor at the Center of War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, the weapon systems that are currently being used in conflicts around the world feature various degrees of autonomy and AI.
“There’s human judgement or human supervision or human authorisation before the release of force,” she says.
However, Dr Bode has concerns with “how meaningful … that human decision-making is”.
Dr Bode points to loitering munitions, one-way attack drones known as killer drones.
“These are small systems that, once launched loiter over a certain geographic area and try to identify pre-programmed targets, and once they identify a target they would launch themselves onto the target, and self-destruct on impact and also disrupt the target,” she explains.
Over the past decade, the types of targets that these systems have been programmed to attack has changed.
“Initially they were only used to attack radar installations … now, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, and also in Syria and Libya, these systems have been used to attack personnel and also to attack a variety of different military vehicles,” Dr Bode explains.
Dr Bode’s main concern is that these weapons are now being used to autonomously identify human targets “potentially using facial recognition”.
The main difficulty, she says, is the verification of the use of this weaponry.
“There are reports from Ukraine where military commanders have been claiming that they’re using some of these systems without direct human control or authorisation, but from the outside, it’s very hard to know because you can’t observe whether the system has been used with the human in the loop or autonomously,” she says.
Who’s investing in these weapons?
Ms Wareham says the United States has led the charge in investing in this new weapon technology.
Other countries such as China, Israel, South Korea, Russia and more recently Iran and Türkiye have also become involved in the development of autonomous weapons systems.
And the race is on to gain a military advantage, Ms Wareham says.
“Artificial intelligence now allows data to be collected and processed and analysed much faster than [by] humans, which [is evident] in our daily lives, but we’re really only starting to understand the implications of that in armed conflict,” Ms Wareham says.
Who’s using them?
When Ms Wareham first started on the killer robots campaign in 2012, she was “working on a pre-emptive ban in a preventative manner”.
“Now, I think we are dealing with the pressures of developments and proliferation,” she says.
The US was the first to use armed drones. However they’ve now started to spread widely and Human Rights Watch is already documenting civilian harm from armed drones in a much more systematic manner.
Ms Wareham says, for example, autonomous weapon systems are being used in Ukraine and in Gaza.
“There have been some disturbing reports about the Israel Defense Forces’ use of digital tools to generate targets in Gaza that’s drawn scrutiny and serious concerns,” she says.
Ms Wareham clarifies that these are digital tools rather than autonomous weapons systems.
According to Human Rights Watch the use of these tools may increase risk of civilian harm as they “appear to rely on faulty data and inexact approximations to inform military actions”.
The argument for killer robots
The most common argument in favour of lethal autonomous weapons is the precision they offer and the removal of the possibility of human error.
However, Ms Wareham says the same justification was used for anti-personnel landmines.
“That’s a very dangerous path that allowed a very indiscriminate explosive weapon to be used widely and to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people before we got that international ban,” she says.
“There are potential advantages and benefits to any weapon system, but some of them go beyond the pale.”
While several countries such as the US, UK and New Zealand have developed national policy on autonomous weapon use, Ms Wareham insists an international treaty is essential.
And she says there’s a lot of support within the international community.
Most notably the proposed treaty has been endorsed by United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
This is a significant shift, as for several years Ms Wareham says many countries believed that current international law would “guide the development of autonomous weapon systems”.
“The Red Cross said, ‘Well, actually, international humanitarian law was written for humans, not for machines’,” she says.
Is it too late for a treaty?
Ms Wareham says it’s never too late.
She says the same question was asked of landmines but the impact of the treaty has been positive.
Ms Wareham hopes she can create a similar agreement for the use of lethal autonomous weapon systems.
She’s confident there will be change, with calls from Guterres and the Red Cross for governments to negotiate a treaty to prohibit and restrict autonomous weapon systems by 2026.
“I’d argue that the treaty is inevitable … and it won’t be too late because we will regulate,” she says.
“I just don’t want to see civilians being harmed and human suffering in the meantime.”
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