Drone assassinsShould we fear the rise of drone assassins? Two experts debate
A new short film from the Campaign Against Killer Robots warns of a future where weaponized flying drones target and assassinate certain members of the public, using facial recognition technology to identify them. Is this a realistic threat that could rightly spur an effective ban on the technology? Or is it an overblown portrayal designed to scare governments into taking simplistic, unnecessary and ultimately futile action? Two academics offer their expert opinions.
A new short film from the Campaign Against Killer Robots warns of a future where weaponized flying drones target and assassinate certain members of the public, using facial recognition technology to identify them. Is this a realistic threat that could rightly spur an effective ban on the technology? Or is it an overblown portrayal designed to scare governments into taking simplistic, unnecessary and ultimately futile action? Two academics offer their expert opinions.
Overactive imagination risks panic and distress
By Peter Lee
The newly released short film offers a bleak dystopia with humans at the mercy of “slaughterbots”. These are autonomous micro-drones with cameras, facial recognition software and lethal explosive charges. Utterly terrifying, and – the film claims – not science fiction but a near-future scenario that really could happen. The film warns with a frightening, deep voice: “They cannot be stopped.” The only salvation from this impending hell is, it is suggested, to ban killer robots.
This imaginative use of film to scare its viewers into action is the 21st-century version of the panic that HG Wells’s science fiction writings created in the early 20th century. New technologies can almost always be used for malevolent purposes but those same technologies – in this case flying robots, facial recognition, autonomous decision-making – can also drive widespread human benefit.
What about the killing part? Yes, three grams of explosive to the head could kill someone. But why go to the expense and trouble of making a lethal micro-drone? Such posturing about the widespread use of targeted, single-shot flying robots is a self-indulgence of technologically advanced societies. It would be hugely costly to develop such selective killing capability for use on a mass scale – certainly outside the capacity of terrorist organizations and, indeed, most militaries.
By comparison, in Rwanda in 1994, 850,000 people were killed in three months, mainly by machetes and garden tools. A shooter in Las Vegas killed at least 59 people and wounded more than 500 in only a few minutes. Meanwhile, in Germany, France and the UK, dozens of innocent people have been killed by terrorists using ordinary vehicles to commit murder. Cheap, easy and impossible to ban.
Bombing from aircraft was not outlawed at the 1922-23 Peace Convention at The Hague because governments didn’t want to surrender the security advantages it offered. Similarly, no government will want to relinquish the potential military benefit from drone technology.
