We Cannot Cede Control of Weapons to Artificial Intelligence

I watched United Nations delegates debate AI-based weapons that can fire without human initiation. Humans cannot be taken out of that decision-making

Imagine a weapon with no human deciding when to launch or pull its trigger. Imagine a weapon programmed by humans to recognize human targets, but then left to scan its internal data bank to decide whether a set of physical characteristics meant a person was friend or foe. When humans make mistakes, and fire weapons at the wrong targets, the outcry can be deafening, and the punishment can be severe. But how would we react, and who would we hold responsible if a computer programmed to control weapons made that fateful decision to fire, and it was wrong?

This isn’t a movie; these were the kinds of questions delegates considered at the April Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems in Vienna. In the midst of this classically European city, famous for waltzes, while people were picking up kids from school and having coffee, expert speakers sat in special high-level panels, microphones in hand, discussing the very real possibility that the development and use of machines programmed to independently judge who lives and who dies might soon be too far gone to come back from.

“This is the ‘Oppenheimer moment’ of our generation,” said Alexander Schallenberg, the Austrian federal minister for European and international affairs, “We cannot let this moment pass without taking action, now is the time to agree on international rules and norms to assure human control.”

Leave a Comment