An international pressure group is being formed to lobby governments to stop the escalation of robot warfare and autonomous weaponry.
The United States government is already using unmanned drone planes to combat terrorism, increasingly so in West Africa, and the new group claims US army chiefs are recruiting more pilots to control planes remotely than actually fly them, reports the Guardian.
HumanIPO reported in November last year that Human Rights Watch had published a 50-page study on the case against killer robots and now the Stop the Killer Robots campaign will launch in the UK in April.
Dr Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and Professor at Sheffield University, said: “In America they are already training more drone pilots than real aircraft pilots, looking for young men who are very good at computer games. They are looking at swarms of robots, with perhaps one person watching what they do.”
Sharkey disagrees with the argument that employing robots in war will ultimately save lives. He said: “Autonomous robotic weapons won’t get tired, they won’t seek revenge if their colleague is killed, but neither will my washing machine.
“No one on your side might get killed, but what effect will you be having on the other side, not just in lives but in attitudes and anger?”
The Stop the Killer Robots group, which included academics, pressure groups and Nobel peace prize laureates, is hoping to persuade governments to ban the machines before they enter the production phase.
