IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2018 - 123

Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues

Novel Techniques
Lethal Autonomous
to Solve
Weapon Systems
Space-Exploration Problems

By L. Righetti, Q.-C. Pham, R. Madhavan, and R. Chatila

By Name name, affliation;
Name name, affliation;

T

he topic of lethal autonomous
weapon systems (LAWS) has
recently caught public attention
due to extensive news coverage
and apocalyptic declarations from
famous scientists and technologists.
Elon Musk said, "I think we should be
very careful about artificial intelligence
(AI). If I had to guess at what our biggest
existential threat is, it's probably that"
[27]. Stephen Hawking was quoted by
the BBC as saying "the development of
full AI could spell the end of the human
race" [28].
As scientists, it is somewhat difficult
and often frustrating to follow this narrative, especially when robotics is associated
with science-fiction characters that are far
from being a tangible reality. Yet, weapon
systems with increasing autonomy are
being developed due to fast improvements in machine learning, robotics,
and automation in general [9]. These
developments raise important and complex security, legal, ethical, societal, and
technological issues that are being
extensively discussed by scholars, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
militaries, governments, and the international community. Unfortunately, the
robotics community has stayed out of
the debate, for the most part, despite
being the main provider of autonomous
technologies. In this column, we review
the main issues raised by the increase of
autonomy in weapon systems and the
state of the international discussion. We
argue that the robotics community has a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2017.2787267
Date of publication: 12 March 2018

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Research and Practice Ethics Committee
(RARPEC) is intended as a platform to exchange ideas and discuss the impacts and
practice of robotics and automation (RA) technologies in research, development,
and deployment that appear to pose ethical questions for humanity. With increased
awareness and controversies surrounding RA, RARPEC is publishing a series of
opinion pieces that will focus on separating hype from reality by providing an
objective and balanced treatment of technological, ethical, legal, and societal
perspectives. First in the series, this piece focuses on the topic of lethal autonomous
weapon systems. Please send your feedback and suggestions to the chair of the
committee, Raj Madhavan, at raj.madhavan@ieee.org.

fundamental role to play in these discussions, for its own sake, to provide the
often-missing technical expertise necessary to frame the debate and promote
technological development in line with
the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (RAS) objective of advancing
technology to benefit humanity.
The First International
Multilateral Discussion on
Autonomous Weapon Systems
The increasing autonomy in weapon
systems became an international issue
in April 2013 with the annual report to
the United Nations (UN) Human
Rights Council of Christof Heyns, the
Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial,
summary, or arbitrary executions,
which discussed the development of
weapons "that, once activated, can
select and engage targets without further human intervention." He argued
that these weapons raised concerns on
the basis of their compliance with
international humanitarian law (IHL)
and on the ethical considerations that
"their deployment may be unacceptable because no adequate system of
legal accountability can be devised,

and because robots should not have
the power of life and death over human
beings" [1]. In November 2012, the U.S.
Department of Defense had released
a directive on
autonomy in
weapon systems The topic of lethal
to "establish poautonomous
licy and assign
responsibilities weapon systems
for the develophas recently caught
ment and use of
autonomous and public attention
semi-autonodue to extensive
mous functions
in weapon sys- news coverage
tems," [19] makand apocalyptic
ing the United
States the first declarations from
country to have
famous scientists
an official policy on LAWS. At and technologists.
about the same
time, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, formed by
ten NGOs and led by the Human
Rights Watch, demanded "a comprehensive, preemptive prohibition on the
development, production, and use of
fully autonomous weapons" [13], [16].

march 2018

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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