From the role of drones, AI and civil-military fusion to his emphasis on boots on the ground, the former Indian army chief is looking at concepts that China has left way behind.
On April 11, 2016, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will hold a week-long meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) in Geneva.[1] Previous meetings were held in 2014 and 2015 to discuss the legality of LAWS under the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and international human rights law.[2] Some nations that attended these meetings, as well as all of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in attendance, have advocated the strict regulation or even outright banning o
Swarms of palm-sized quadcopters perform kamikaze attacks using tiny explosives to kill selected people using facial-recognition software and social media big-data analysis. News footage shows attacks on U.S. senators, student protesters, and hundreds of other civilians worldwide. Is this the trailer for a new science fiction blockbuster movie? No, this graphic, fictional scenario of a dystopian near-future is the video “Slaughterbots,” produced by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization fixated on the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Autonomous weapon systems (AWS) could in principle release military personnel from the onus of killing during combat missions, reducing the related risk of suffering a moral injury and its debilitating psychological effects. Does it follow that the armed forces are obliged to replace human soldiers with machines to reduce the incidence of moral injuries? We address this question from a virtue ethics perspective that construes moral injury as a form of character deterioration, a disgrace that just societies and institutions are morally committed to preventing. The question is divided in two sub-questions: (1) can the use of AWS reduce the risk of moral injury and is such a solution more effective than similar ones? (2) Is the use of AWS an ethically desirable solution to prevent moral injury or does it carry unethical implications that make it ultimately unsuitable? We tackle these questions comparing the opposite risks of character deterioration represented by moral injury and moral de