U.N. chief urges action on ‘killer robots’ as Geneva talks open

By Emma Farge

GENEVA (Reuters) – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Monday for new rules covering the use of autonomous weapons as a key meeting on the issue opened in Geneva.

Negotiators at the U.N. talks have for eight years been discussing limits on lethal autonomous weapons, or LAWS, which are fully machine-controlled and rely on new technology such as artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

But pressure has increased in part due to a U.N. panel report in March that said the first autonomous drone attack may have already occurred in Libya.

“I encourage the Review Conference to agree on an ambitious plan for the future to establish restrictions on the use of certain types of autonomous weapons,” Guterres said at the start of the five-day talks.

The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has 125 parties including the United States, China and Israel.

Some participating states such as Austria call for a total ban on LAWS while others including Washington have been more reticent and have pointed to potential benefits of such weapons which might be more precise than humans in hitting targets.

Amnesty International and civil society groups are calling for countries to start negotiating an international treaty and will present a petition to negotiators later on Monday.

“The pace of technology is really beginning to outpace the rate of diplomatic talks,” said Clare Conboy of Stop Killer Robots. “(This) is a historic opportunity for states to take steps to safeguard humanity against autonomy in the use of force.”

France’s Disarmament Ambassador Yann Hwang, who is president of the talks, called for “key and vital decisions” to be taken this week. However, diplomats say the body, which requires consensus, is unlikely to reach agreement launching an international treaty, with Russia among others expected to oppose such a step.

“There is not enough support to launch a treaty at this stage but we think some principles could be agreed for national implementation,” said a diplomat involved in the talks.

If no agreement can be reached, countries might move talks to another forum either inside or outside the United Nations.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Giles Elgood)

World must keep lethal weapons under human control, Germany says

FILE PHOTO: German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas arrives for the weekly German cabinet meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s foreign minister on Friday called for urgent efforts to ensure that humans remained in control of lethal weapons, as a step toward banning “killer robots”.

Heiko Maas told an arms control conference in Berlin that rules were needed to limit the development and use of weapons that could kill without human involvement.

Critics fear that the increasingly autonomous drones, missile defense systems and tanks made possible by new technology and artificial intelligence could turn rogue in a cyber-attack or as a result of programming errors.

The United Nations and the European Union have called for a global ban on such weapons, but discussions so far have not yielded a clear commitment to conclude a treaty.

“Killer robots that make life-or-death decisions on the basis of anonymous data sets, and completely beyond human control, are already a shockingly real prospect today,” Maas said. “Fundamentally, it’s about whether we control the technology or it controls us.”

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands signed a declaration at the conference vowing to work to prevent weapons proliferation.

“We want to want to codify the principle of human control over all deadly weapons systems internationally, and thereby take a big step toward a global ban on fully autonomous weapons,” Maas told the conference.

He said he hoped progress could be made in talks under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) this year. The next CCW talks on lethal autonomous weapons take place this month in Geneva.

Human Rights Watch’s Mary Wareham, coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, urged Germany to push for negotiations on a global treaty, rather than a non-binding declaration.

“Measures that fall short of a new ban treaty will be insufficient to deal with the multiple challenges raised by killer robots,” she said in a statement.

In a new Ipsos survey, 61 percent of respondents in 26 countries opposed the use of lethal autonomous weapons.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Kevin Liffey)