UN officials, scientists and activists have gathered this week to debate a not-so-distant tomorrow filled with autonomous robot warriors -- but machines that can kill without human guidance are already here.
In fact, they are already being tested by militaries across the world.
This week's talks in Geneva are the
beginning of a debate over whether autonomous lethal systems will eventually be banned under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).
Some of the robots are just prototypes. Others, like sentry robots installed by South Korea and Israel, have the ability to kill autonomously but don't. As the technology gets more advanced, some officials are worried that stories about "Terminator"-style robots might slow the adoption of machines that could save the lives of their soldiers.
It's not just governments that are interested in the technology that's developed in the pursuit of warrior robots. In December,
Google bought Boston Dynamics, a company famous for building an array of frighteningly realistic robots for the research arm of the Department of Defense.
'Fire and forget'
The Demilitarized Zone along South Korea's border is lined with mechanized sentinels. Each stationery robot looks kind of like a menacing security camera, but with the ability to lock its built-in machine gun onto a human target and shoot to kill.
The SGR-A1 robots, developed jointly by Samsung Techwin and Korea University, can automatically detect North Korean soldiers walking over the border and could technically fire without the help of a human.
That is not how they work in practice. Instead, once the SGR-A1 detects something, it alerts an operator who can then decide to pull the trigger. Why the middleman?
“They got a lot of bad press about having autonomous killer robots on their border,” Peter Asaro, the co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, told NBC News from Geneva.
The SGR-A1 is not even that advanced by today's standards, Asaro said, comparing its sensors to the ones used by Microsoft's Kinect.
Other, more advanced robots are being tested right now. The U.S. Navy has successfully launched Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, a stealth drone the size of a fighter jet, from its aircraft carriers. In the U.K., Taranis, a top-secret unmanned aircraft named after the Celtic god of thunder, can travel at supersonic speeds and could be used by the British military to carry out pre-programmed attacks. (BAE Systems said the aircraft is
meant to be usedunder the "control of a human operator").
