The United States and Russia succeeded in weakening a number of proposed restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence in lethal autonomous weapons. In particular, the requirement that a human verify an AI-selected military target before a strike was removed from the document, The Washington Post reports, writes UNN.
Details
The issue concerns UN negotiations on future international rules governing the use of autonomous weapons. According to the publication, they represented the biggest progress in recent years toward a potential global agreement in this area.
However, during the final stage of the negotiations, the U.S. and Russian delegations secured the removal of several safeguards at once. In particular, the requirements that systems operate "predictably" and "reliably" were removed from the text, as was a provision on taking into account the ethical aspects of using AI in combat.
What threat could this pose to people
The greatest concern was caused by the removal of a provision requiring a human to verify a military target identified by artificial intelligence before a strike was carried out.
In simple terms, this concerns the risk of the emergence of combat systems in which an algorithm could independently find and select a target, while human control over the final decision would be weaker or not guaranteed at all by international rules.
This could mean that machines would be able to make life-and-death decisions without human control
According to her, the consequences could include a greater number of civilian casualties, difficulties in determining who is responsible for an erroneous strike, and a faster transition to automated warfare.
The particular danger lies in the speed of such systems. If states deploy autonomous weapons on a mass scale, algorithms could potentially detect targets and respond much faster than humans. In the event of an error, misidentification, or incorrect data, there may be significantly less time for human intervention.
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