Autonomous Weapons Systems and Meaningful Human Control: Ethical and Legal Issues

Abstract

Purpose of Review To provide readers with a compact account of ongoing academic and diplomatic debates about autonomy in weapons systems, that is, about the moral and legal acceptability of letting a robotic system to unleash destructive force in warfare and take attendant life-or-death decisions without any human intervention. Recent Findings A précis of current debates is provided, which focuses on the requirement that all weapons systems, including autonomous ones, should remain under meaningful human control (MHC) in order to be ethically acceptable and lawfully employed. Main approaches to MHC are described and briefly analyzed, distinguishing between uniform, differentiated, and prudential policies for human control on weapons systems. Summary The review highlights the crucial role played by the robotics research community to start ethical and legal debates about autonomy in weapons systems. A concise overview is provided of the main concerns emerging in those early debates: respect of the laws of war, responsibility ascription issues, violation of the human dignity of potential victims of autonomous weapons systems, and increased risks for global stability. It is pointed out that these various concerns have been jointly taken to support the idea that all weapons systems, including autonomous ones, should remain under meaningful human control (MHC). Main approaches to MHC are described and briefly analyzed. Finally, it is emphasized that the MHC idea looms large on shared control policies to adopt in other ethically and legally sensitive application domains for robotics and artificial intelligence. Keywords Autonomous weapons systems. Roboethics. International humanitarian law. Human-robot shared control. Meaningful human control This article is part of the Topical Collection on Roboethics

“Autonomous weapons” as a geopolitical signifier in a national power play: analysing AI imaginaries in Chinese and US military policies

“…But from this observation, we can hardly deduce that we have arrived at the very essence of what the weaponry actually is and what it is capable of. While the role of human intervention in AWS is ethically and politically a much-needed debate, but not a debate without pitfalls as discussed by various authors regarding "meaningful human control" [24,[68][69][70][71][72], it simultaneously raises further confusion if it is regarded as an appropriate characteristic in defining AWS.…”

Roboethics principles and policies in Europe and North America

“…At least 50 countries have either bought robots for military purposes or have military robotics programs; the U.S. Department of Defense has allocated $7.5 billion to development of unmanned systems in the fiscal year 2021 [40,41]. Militaries around the world have been using robots to conduct reconnaissance, do surveillance, disarm landmines, and engage with targets [42]. It is the latter kind that is of outmost concern for the ethicists.…”

“…Whether LAWS should be able to make life and death decisions and follow up with violence based on that decision is the cornerstone question for ethicists and policymakers. Some researchers argue that LAWS should be under meaningful human control even after deployment, thus limiting the autonomy of such robots and still permitting for human-directed decision-making [42]. This point of view is supported by governmental organizations, for example the European Parliament resolution on a comprehensive European industrial policy on AI and robotics notes that "automated weapons systems should continue to have a human-in-command approach to artificial intelligence" [46].…”

Digital Humanism and Global Issues in Artificial Intelligence Ethics

“…The protection of both human life and dignity has been playing a crucial role in the ethical and legal debate about autonomous weapons systems (AWS), that is, weapons systems that are capable of selecting and attacking military objectives without requiring any human intervention after their activation. The wide spectrum of positions emerging in this debate has invariably acknowledged as a serious possibility the occurrence of AWS suppressing human lives in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) (Amoroso and Tamburrini 2020). Indeed, AI perceptual systems, developed by machine learning and paving the way to more advanced AWS, were found by adversarial testing to incur into unexpected and counter-intuitive errors that human operators would easily detect and avoid.…”