Algorithms of Violence: Critical Social Perspectives on Autonomous Weapons

For the past six years, a treaty body within the United Nations called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) has held a series of informal Meetings of Experts, followed by an ongoing series of formal Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) meetings on the questions surrounding lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS): What are they, and should their development and use by militaries be prohibited or restricted in any way? These discussions have focused primarily on how existing law might, or might not, apply to such systems; where the technology is heading; and how modern militaries develop, evaluate, and deploy systems with high degrees of automation (United Nations Office at Geneva 2019). To a lesser extent, they have also explored the moral and ethical dimensions of such systems, including a presentation by myself in 2014 (Asaro 2014). Civil society has made clear its view that autonomous weapons pose numerous threats that are best addressed by prohibiting their development and use (www.stopkillerrobots.org)...