#autonomous weapons

On the night of September 26, 1983, the world almost ended. It was the height of the Cold War, and each side bristled with nuclear weapons. Earlier that spring, President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” a planned missile defense shield that threatened to upend the Cold War’s delicate balance. Just three weeks earlier on September 1, the Soviet…

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Logistics convoys and retreating forces were "hunted down and remotely engaged by lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2," the report reads. "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget, and find' capability."

The creator of the Kargu drone, STM, says the device "can be effectively used against static or moving targets through its indigenous and real-time image processing capabilities and machine learning algorithms embedded on the platform."

The UN in 2018 attempted to begin working on a treaty that would ban autonomous weapons, but the move was blocked by both the US and Russia. Human Rights Watch has been campaigning against such weapons since 2013, and has backed a campaign to stop their spread. 

"Killer robot proliferation has begun," tweeted Max Tegman, a machine learning researcher at MIT. "It's not in humanity's best interest that cheap slaughterbots are mass-produced and widely available to anyone with an axe to grind. It's high time for world leaders to step up and take a stand." 

from the company's website:

but wait! it gets better - let's swarm these bad boys:

so. killer robots.

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GRP 115-  Our guest for this week’s episode is Pentagon defense expert and former U.S. Army Ranger Paul Scharre. Paul’s new book, ARMY OF NONE: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War is a necessary analysis of this new world. In the book, Scharre traces the emergence of this technology, drawing on incisive research and his personal experiences through four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to explore the moral and practical challenges of machine-decision making in today’s messy, modern wars.

 We covered:

 • The rise of fully autonomous weapons and the movement to ban them

• The legal and ethical issues surrounding autonomous weapons

• The role of artificial intelligence in military technology

• How fatal incidents of autonomous weapons gone wrong inform and refine operating procedures, doctrine, and software

• How do nations trust one another in an environment of autonomous weapons and cooperate to avoid harmful outcomes?

• When a robot kills, who stands trial?

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                                    Global Recon:

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 Chantel Taylor:

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 Tim Kolczak: www.thevetsproject.com

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   Music provided by Caspian:

SLAUGHTERBOTS