UN envoy wants to stop development 'Terminators'

Terminators or autonomous killing machines / army robots

A special envoy of the United Nations calls to put a hold in the development of so-called Terminators a break. These robots can, without human intervention, kill people. That brings a lot of questions on the table, according to the UN envoy.

It is unclear which countries are currently engaged in the development of Terminators, but UN envoy Christof Heijn refers in his report to the technology of the United States and Israel and he has visited facilities in Mexico, Syria and Turkey. Terminators are robots that function without being controlled by people and thus independently make the decision to kill certain people or not.

Heijn stresses that such lethal autonomous robots do not yet exist in his knowledge.

For me it is impossible to predict how close we are to the point where lethal autonomous robots can be deployed. Several have committed to develop them and are currently having multiple development programs as we speak. Military documents describe robotic arms in the air, on land and at sea with various stages of autonomy.

The UN envoy doesn't reject the use of the Terminators in advance, but would particularly for agreements to be related to the software where the use of robots and who bears responsibility for the killing of people. "It seems logical to designate the human commanders but how can they know in advance that a robot commits an offense?" This involves, for example, civilian casualties, something that is seen as a war crime. Moreover, autonomous robots, the threshold to start to decrease, because there is no or less casualties in the army that attacks a war.

The report of the UN envoy will be considered by a committee of the United Nations that deals with human rights. The United Nations may adopt resolutions, but do not have the force of law. The ethical questions about the autonomy of robots on the battlefield there for years and various organizations worldwide calling for restraint in the development.

Earlier this year, Future-blog.eu already predicted military killing robots to hit the scene around 2918, some 5 years from now. Defense expert J. Burton explains further:

Especially the US (in cooperation with Israel and in some extend the United Kingdom) are currently in testing-phase of this new technology. While military killing robots have already been around for some years, autonomous versions are now used in testing fields and it's even been reported that they have been seen in real war battle zones.
In the deserts of Arizone and Texas many people have witnessed military killing robots, or Terminators engaged in war-games amongst other war robots. This has been going on for at least 4 years, the first reports came in around the middle of 2009.

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