Lethal Autonomous Weapons & Combat Drones Watch Thread

[Yuli Ban]

The US has rejected calls for a binding agreement regulating or banning the use of “killer robots”, instead proposing a “code of conduct” at the United Nations.

Speaking at a meeting in Geneva focused on finding common ground on the use of such so-called lethal autonomous weapons, a US official balked at the idea of regulating their use through a “legally-binding instrument”.

The meeting saw government experts preparing for high-level talks at a review conference on the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons from 13 to 17 December.

“In our view, the best way to make progress ... would be through the development of a non-binding code of conduct,” US official Josh Dorosin told the meeting.

The United Nations has been hosting diplomatic talks in Geneva since 2017 aimed at reaching an agreement on how to address the use of killer robots.

Activists and a number of countries have called for an all-out ban on any weapons that could use lethal force without a human overseeing the process and making the final kill order.

[BaobabScion]

To be fair, killer robots in their most rudimentary forms aren't very complicated things to make, so long as you're not terribly concerned about collateral damage. We've had automated turrets or sentry guns for several decades and several governments openly use them in base defense. Take South Korea and Israel as examples. Also, we obviously use drones fairly frequently.

[caltrek]

United Nations Fails to Agree on ‘Killer Robot’ Ban as Nations Pour Billions into Autonomous Weapons Research
by James Dawes

https://theconversation.com/un-fails-to ... rch-173616

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world’s cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons

Further Extract:

I see four primary dangers with autonomous weapons. The first is the problem of misidentification…

The next two dangers are the problems of low-end and high-end proliferation…

Finally, autonomous weapons will undermine humanity’s final stopgap against war crimes and atrocities: the international laws of war.

[Yuli Ban]

It may have seemed like an obscure United Nations conclave, but a meeting this week in Geneva was followed intently by experts in artificial intelligence, military strategy, disarmament and humanitarian law.

The reason for the interest? Killer robots — drones, guns and bombs that decide on their own, with artificial brains, whether to attack and kill — and what should be done, if anything, to regulate or ban them.

Once the domain of science fiction films like the “Terminator” series and “RoboCop,” killer robots, more technically known as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, have been invented and tested at an accelerated pace with little oversight. Some prototypes have even been used in actual conflicts.

The evolution of these machines is considered a potentially seismic event in warfare, akin to the invention of gunpowder and nuclear bombs.

This year, for the first time, a majority of the 125 nations that belong to an agreement called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or C.C.W., said they wanted curbs on killer robots. But they were opposed by members that are developing these weapons, most notably the United States and Russia.

[Yuli Ban]

300-Plus Swarm Drones Just Flew In This DARPA Test: One drone armed with a missile or a bomb can take out a tank or a building. Make it 10 drones, and you can create havoc on a battlefield or a city street.

But what happens when 300 drones attack?


You can get a glimpse of this in a video of the latest test (see below) of DARPA’s Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) project, the Pentagon’s bid to use develop autonomous robots that operate in hordes. The video includes footage of about 10 quadcopters circling a target, a hobby-sized model airplane weaving through urban streets, and columns of little four-wheel ground robots lined up on a road.

This is a taste of the future. Swarm drones – on air, land and sea – promise to be one of the revolutionary weapons of the 21st Century. The idea is to send so many small robots that the target is overwhelmed. Fling 100 quadcopters or toy-sized ground vehicles at a target, and even if the defender shoots down 10, that leaves 90 to complete the mission.

[Yuli Ban]

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity's final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn't reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world's cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

[Yuli Ban]

On a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor. The bay in front of the cockpit was filled with sensors and computer processors that recorded the aircraft’s performance. For two hours, the pilot flew counterclockwise around the lake. Engineers on the ground, under contract with darpa, the Defense Department’s research agency, had choreographed every turn, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to do something unprecedented: design a plane that can fly and engage in aerial combat—dogfighting—without a human pilot operating it.

The exercise was an early step in the agency’s Air Combat Evolution program, known as ace, one of more than six hundred Department of Defense projects that are incorporating artificial intelligence into war-fighting. This year, the Pentagon plans to spend close to a billion dollars on A.I.-related technology. The Navy is building unmanned vessels that can stay at sea for months; the Army is developing a fleet of robotic combat vehicles. Artificial intelligence is being designed to improve supply logistics, intelligence gathering, and a category of wearable technology, sensors, and auxiliary robots that the military calls the Internet of Battlefield Things.

Algorithms are already good at flying planes. The first autopilot system, which involved connecting a gyroscope to the wings and tail of a plane, débuted in 1914, about a decade after the Wright brothers took flight. And a number of current military technologies, such as underwater mine detectors and laser-guided bombs, are autonomous once they are launched by humans. But few aspects of warfare are as complex as aerial combat. Paul Schifferle, the vice-president of flight research at Calspan, the company that’s modifying the L-39 for darpa, said, “The dogfight is probably the most dynamic flight program in aviation, period.”

[Yuli Ban]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/4 ... efield-use

The U.S. Army has selected American drone manufacturer Skydio for its Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program which seeks to field a low-cost, rapidly-deployable scout drone that can be carried by individual soldiers. Commercially-available off-the-shelf drones have been used for these roles in the past, but operational security concerns over the use of foreign-made drones have in recent years led the U.S. government to restrict drone technologies from countries deemed adversarial. With advanced American-made drones now being acquired, it's possible that small man-portable drones become standard equipment throughout the service.

In a company press release issued this week, Skydio says they were awarded a $20.2 million/year contract to deliver their X2D drones to the Army’s SRR program. It’s unknown how many individual units will be included in the firm-fixed-price production contract, which will run for five years.

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Autonomous weapon systems—commonly known as killer robots—may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity's final one.

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its once-every-five-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. 13-17, 2021, but didn't reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the convention has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world's cruelest conventional weapons, including land mines, booby traps and incendiary weapons.

Inb4 plot twist UN agrees on Killer Robots just not banning them at this time.

[Doozer]

I think killer robots just might be the go-to monster in horror films in the near future. By that I mean they just might replace zombies in the popular zeitgeist.

[Yuli Ban]

Oh it's really kicking off now

A RUSSIAN “SUICIDE drone” that boasts the ability to identify targets using artificial intelligence has been spotted in images of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Photographs showing what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone known as a “loitering munition” sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov, have appeared on Telegram and Twitter in recent days. The pictures show damaged drones that appear to have either crashed or been shot down.

With a wingspan of 1.2 meters, the sleek white drone resembles a small pilotless fighter jet. It is fired from a portable launch, can travel up to 130 kilometers per hour for 30 minutes, and deliberately crashes into a target, detonating a 3-kilo explosive.

ZALA Aero, which first demoed the KUB-BLA at a Russian air show in 2019, claims in promotional material that it features “intelligent detection and recognition of objects by class and type in real time.”

[caltrek]

'Killer Robots' Are Already Here. They Just Don't Look Like You Think
by Toby Walsh
October 17, 2022

Extract:

(Science Alert) Movies that feature much simpler armed drones, like Angel has Fallen (2019) and Eye in the Sky (2015), paint perhaps the most accurate picture of the real future of killer robots.

On the nightly TV news, we see how modern warfare is being transformed by ever-more autonomous drones, tanks, ships, and submarines. These robots are only a little more sophisticated than those you can buy in your local hobby store.

And increasingly, the decisions to identify, track, and destroy targets are being handed over to their algorithms.

This is taking the world to a dangerous place, with a host of moral, legal, and technical problems. Such weapons will, for example, further upset our troubled geopolitical situation. We already see Turkey emerging as a major drone power.

And such weapons cross a moral red line into a terrible and terrifying world where unaccountable machines decide who lives and who dies.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/killer-ro ... you-think

[Yuli Ban]

They are precise, small in size, able to effectively penetrate air defenses when fired in groups.

Above all, they’re cheap.

In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, killer drones have cemented their reputation as a potent, cost-effective weapon that can seek out and destroy targets while simultaneously spreading the kind of terror that can fray the resolve of soldiers and civilians alike.

They’re also quickly surpassing missiles as the remote weapon of choice. Known as “the poor man's cruise missile,” the flying death machines can flood any combat theater much more cheaply.

[Yuli Ban]

[caltrek]

Netherlands Becomes First NATO Country To Deploy Killer Robots
by Jack Dunhill
October 20, 2022

Introduction:

(IFL Science) The Netherlands has become the first NATO country to deploy armed uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) into an operational environment in which the tracked robots will join a military unit and become part of the defense force. Some are unarmed, while others are carrying large automatic machine guns for use in firefights.

“We have deployed four weaponised [unmanned] machines within an operational experiment,” Lt Col Mevissen, commander of the Royal Netherlands Army's Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) unit, told Dutch media outlet Janes. “To my knowledge, we have not seen this before in the West”.

“The machines have been handed over for experimental use in an operational unit in a military-relevant environment. These are not simply tests on a training ground. We are under the direct eyes and ears of the Russians, and as such in a semi-operational environment,” he continued.

The UGVs will be Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry Systems (THeMIS), which were created by an Estonian defense company. When armed, the THeMIS can be armed with either 30mm autocannons, 40mm grenade launches, light or heavy machine guns, or anti-tank missiles. It remains to be seen how THeMIS will perform, as UGVs do not have a great history so far – Russia deployed their version in Syria in 2018, where it was remarkably ineffective due to constant disconnections with the controller.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/netherlands ... ots-65859

[weatheriscool]

I think it is wonderful. If we humans could settle our differences just by seeing who's bots could defeat the others within a area that no one lives we'd be better off.

[weatheriscool]

U.S. begins flying drones out of Kagoshima MSDF base
Source: Asahi Shimbun

KANOYA, Kagoshima Prefecture--Deploying eyes to the sky over troubled waters, the U.S. Air Force began launching its MQ-9 Reaper drones from the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Kanoya Air Base here on Nov. 21.

The unmanned aircraft will be used for surveillance and reconnaissance duties in the East China Sea and other surrounding waters until November next year. An estimated 150 to 200 U.S. military personnel will be stationed in Kanoya to provide operational support.

According to the U.S. military and the Defense Ministry, eight MQ-9 Reapers are deployed at the base. The drones, measuring 11 meters long and 20 meters wide, are equipped with high-performance sensors that can detect the movement of ships at night and in bad weather.

The aim is to strengthen intelligence-gathering capabilities under the Japan-U.S. alliance, with China and Russia and other nations in mind.

Read more: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14774606

[caltrek]

Seventy States Join Cross-Regional Joint Statement on Autonomous Weapons at UN General Assembly


Entire Article:

(Automated Decision Research) On the 21st October 2022, the first-ever UN General Assembly joint statement on autonomous weapons was delivered on behalf of a cross-regional group of seventy states by Amb. Alexander Kmentt, Director of the Disarmament, Arms Control and Nonproliferation Department at the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The joint statement recognises the need for ‘internationally agreed rules and limits’ on autonomous weapons systems, and notes that ‘the human element is and must remain central in the use of force’. The statement also emphasises ‘the necessity for human beings to exert appropriate control, judgement and involvement in relation to the use of weapons systems in order to ensure any use is in compliance with International Law, in particular International Humanitarian Law, and that humans remain accountable for decisions on the use of force’.

Stop Killer Robots’ response to the joint statement, and the joint statement in full with the list of signatories, can be read here.

The majority of states involved in UN-level discussions on autonomous weapons systems support the negotiation of new legally binding rules on autonomous weapons.

Source: https://automatedresearch.org/news/sev ... assembly/

[wjfox]

[wjfox]