The weapons in question - killer robots.

[David Lockmiller]

The weapons in question - killer robots.

Washington Post
December 16, 2021

James Dawes is a professor and director of human rights and humanitarianism at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.

A meeting is taking place in Geneva this week that could be the moment when the world prevented — or started — its final arms race. The weapons in question: killer robots.

The United Nations is convening a group of diplomats and arms experts to review one of the world’s most important yet least-known treaties: the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. At stake is a future world that fans of “The Terminator” franchise might recognize. But that was fiction; this is very real.

Established in 1983, the treaty has been updated regularly to restrict some of the world’s most malicious conventional weapons technologies that pose grave risks to innocent civilians. These include land mines, booby-traps, incendiary weapons, unexploded ordinances and weapons that create non-detectable fragments that render wound treatment nearly impossible. This week, negotiators will decide whether to add autonomous weapons systems to that list.