Our fear of the intentions of robots has been around since the first robot was built. At times, many, including Elon Musk and Sam Harris, have claimed that artificial intelligence poses serious problems for human civilization. And now a new UN report comes to reinforce that fear, as it explains that a drone voluntarily attacked (and possibly killed) soldiers.
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It is believed to be the first recorded case of an autonomous drone attack.
The incident occurred last March in Libya, a country in the midst of a civil war. Turkey deployed the STM Kargu-2 unmanned aerial vehicle , according to a report by the UN Security Council ’s panel of experts . The drone, which the report describes as a “ lethal autonomous weapon ,” then targeted and attacked Haftar’s Libyan Armed Forces (HAF).
Logistics columns and retreating forces were “hunted down and tracked remotely by ‘lethal autonomous weapons such as the STM Kargu-2,’” the report states. “The lethal autonomous weapon systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring a data link between the operator and the weapon, but were given complete freedom of aiming.”
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The creator of the Kargu drone, STM, says that it “can be effectively used on static or moving targets through the real-time image processing capabilities and machine learning algorithms built into the platform.”
The UN in 2018 tried to start work on a treaty that would ban autonomous weapons, but the move was blocked by both the US and Russia, Politico reported at the time. Human Rights Watch has been campaigning against such weapons since 2013 and has supported a campaign to stop their proliferation.
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“The proliferation of killer robots has begun,” tweeted Max Tegman, a machine learning researcher at MIT. “It is not in humanity’s best interest for cheap killer robots to be mass-produced and widely available to anyone with the money to buy them. It’s time for world leaders to step up and take a stand.”
