GENEVA: Vatican Calls For UN Ban On “Killer Robots”

The Catholic Crux reports:

Fully automated and autonomous lethal weapons systems must be banned now before they become a reality in tomorrow’s wars, a Vatican representative said.

The development of robotic weapons or “killer robots” will provide “the capacity of altering irreversibly the nature of warfare, becoming more detached from human agency, putting in question the humanity of our societies,” Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic told a group of experts at the United Nations in Geneva.

The first such autonomous weapon was the land mine, but rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have broadened the potential for weapons with extensive autonomy from human decision-making. “The Holy See has expressed its concerns on several occasions” about this deadly form of weapons system, the archbishop said.