Matilda Byrne on Australia's position on Killer Robots
John Rodsted:
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 must not delegate decision making from humans to machines.
Matilda Byrne is the national coordinator of the Australian Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is an international effort to preemptively create a binding treaty that will bring restrictions and the ban to a concept of weapons system that would have no meaningful human control - lethal autonomous weapons or killer robots. She holds a master’s degree in international relations and is presently working on a PhD, on international security and global governance. Welcome Tilly.
Matilda Byrne: Thank you for having me!
John Rodsted: Killer robots! Can you tell me what they are and why do you want them banned?
Matilda Byrne: Killer robots or lethal autonomous weapon systems are essentially weapons that are using artificial intelligence. And so for their selecting of targets and the decision to deploy lethal force, this is all done by the AI algorithms. So there's no human that oversees or intervenes or controls the targeting of people and then deciding to kill those people as targets. And so as for why we would like to ban these weapons, there's a whole host of different concerns across moral, ethical, legal, security concerns. For me, I think one of the most compelling things is this idea of delegating the decision making over life to a machine. And so seeing that as humanity, we are not prepared to have this decision done solely by an algorithm and that a human has to control this question of life and death of another human being.
John Rodsted: So, where does Australia sit on this subject? Is Australia for killer robots or against them?
Australia, regrettably has this position where they say it's premature to support a ban. They've been saying this for years now. And essentially what this means is that Australia would like to have the option to potentially develop lethal autonomous weapons in the future. And so beyond that as well, they have suggested many times in public forums, so at the United Nations and in their own sort of reports and things that these weapons could potentially be also desirable. And so we need to research more. We want to look at developments in this direction and see how it could be really positive for our military. Obviously this is an incredibly disappointing position, especially because there's been no attempt by the Australian government or defence to engage with the idea of human control and actually to maintain human control in the decision making.
There are strong diplomatic efforts from civil society to get a ban on these weapons before they are developed and deployed, in short a treaty. Is this movement gaining any traction? And if so, with who?
Matilda Byrne: Yes, it definitely is. We've been seeing growing momentum towards these calls for a ban. And so first you have the different governments of the world. There is a grouping of 120 different countries called the non-aligned movement who have declared their support for a ban. In addition, there's also 30 different countries who have explicitly stated that they support a ban in the talks at the specific forum that deals with this issue of lethal autonomous weapons.
And as well as that, you've mentioned the civil society movement. So we have a lot of tech workers that are speaking up about having a ban and why that's...
