SafeGroud Presents the series ‘Stay in Command’
: Mary Wareham on the Killer Robot Campaign
2020-Sep-1
Welcome to SafeGround, the small organisation with big ideas working in disarmament, human security, climate change and refugees. I’m John Rodsted.
Thank you for tuning in to our series Stay in Command where we talk about lethal autonomous weapons, the Australian context and why we mustn’t delegate decision making from man to machines.
Today we speak with Mary Wareham who is the advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. Originally a native of Wellington in New Zealand she has been working in the disarmament sector for many years and is based in Washington DC. She is also the International Coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and joins us from Washington now. Welcome Mary.
You’ve had an extraordinary career working on the most important treaties since the 1990’s. The list of work is the success story of recent disarmament driven by civil society. The big two would have to be the treaty banning Anti-Personnel Landmines in 1997, the treaty banning Cluster Munitions in 2008.
Of these treaties, the work of civil society drove those processes and forced governments to account and ultimately change. The Landmines Treaty was awarded the highest international accolade with the Nobel Peace Prizes from 1997.
Today we don’t look back to celebrate the past but to the future in her work to ban, Killer Robots.
Killer Robots - sounds like a cheap Sci fi movie[00:02:52]
John Rodsted: Killer robots. Sounds like a cheap sci fi movie or a scene from the Terminator. What in fact are they?
Mary Wareham: Well, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not so concerned about the Sentient walking, talking you know Terminator, like a killer robot. We're more grounded in reality. And what we've seen is the small number of military powers, most notably China, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United States are investing very heavily, now in military applications of artificial intelligence and the developing air land and sea based autonomous weapon systems.
We've been quite careful to call for a preemptive ban on fully autonomous weapons, which means that focuses on future weapons systems, not these existing ones that are out there today. But it helps to look at them, especially the extent of human control over the critical functions of selecting your target and then firing on it more and more.
We see senses being used to detect targets. And increasingly they're not controlled by humans. We have facial recognition technology cameras that are now employing that, there's heat senses, to detect body heat, motion senses, which can detect how you walk, your gate and of course, since it's for radars and we're all carrying around a great you know tracking device in our pockets, which has called a mobile phone using GPS technology. So it's a combination of different technologies, but, I think it's a bigger reflection of how our own lives are becoming much more subject to computer processing. And there are big technological developments that raise fundamental questions for humanity. When you try and incorporate artificial intelligence into a weapon system, to the point that you no longer have that meaningful human control.
Meaningful Human Control? [00:04:43]
John Rodsted: Can you explain a bit about meaningful human control for us and what's the difference between an autonomous weapon, which is using artificial intelligence. Can you flesh that out a bit more for us please?
Mary Wareham: wow. I mean, what is that artificial intelligence? There's still not any agreed on definition. So what we tend to talk...
