his week, delegates to the United Nations
Convention on Certain Conventional
Weapons (CCW) will discuss the CCW’s agenda
for spring 2015. One topic of consideration will
be whether to hold further discussions on lethal
autonomous weapon systems (LAWS),
emerging technologies that raise significant
legal, policy, moral and ethical issues.
In May of 2014, the CCW held the first
multilateral discussions on LAWS. These
discussions were productive in refining states’
understanding of LAWS, but the role of
autonomy in the use of force is a complicated
issue that merits further consideration.
State parties to the CCW should renew the
mandate for discussion and hold substantive
talks on autonomous weapons in the spring of
2015, including diving deeper on technical issues
and clarifying nascent terminology.
What are Lethal Autonomous Weapon
Systems?
LAWS are weapon systems that, once activated,
can select and engage targets without further
human intervention, also known as without a
human “in the loop.” This is different from
drones today, where a human is responsible for
firing weapons against any target.
LAWS generally do not exist today, but
increasing automation in systems across both
militaries and the commercial sector suggest it is
important to consider this topic now:
• Rapid advances in computer technology
have raised the prospect for the future
development of autonomous weapon
systems.
• It is important to distinguish between trends
toward greater autonomy in systems in
general, such as self-driving cars or military
robots or missiles with advanced navigation
features, and autonomous weapons that
would select and engage targets on their
own.
• Some simple forms of autonomous weapons
already exist, although they are generally
limited to systems supervised by humans
that protect vehicles and military bases from
attacks. These include active protection
systems for ground vehicles to shoot
incoming rockets and automatic modes in
air and missile defenses to prevent ships or
military bases from being overwhelmed by
multiple, simultaneous threats. These
human-supervised defensive systems are
employed by many nations today.
