Calling for a preemptive ban on the killer robots at a UN conference, NGOs and activists have said that the fully autonomous weapons could be as lethal as a nuclear bomb and could change the face of warfare.
The debate was the part of a five-day long Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) meeting of experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems which began in Geneva yesterday.
"It (Killer robots) is so critically important because it will change the face of warfare. It is as revolutionary as nuclear bombs. That's gunpowder," political activist and Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams said.
"It is a huge leap backward, in our view, morally and ethically. The US and the UK would argue it is a huge leap forward," said Williams.
Though robotic weapons, including armed drones, are used around the world with alarming regularities, military experts say that autonomous killer robots could be the next big thing in modern warfare within two decades.
While China said that the prospect of "cold blooded killing" of humans by autonomous machines is not too distant a prospect, Japan said that it will not make weapons that "commit murder." The US had said last year that it is premature to consider a prohibition.
Williams said that it was completely unacceptable that a handful of nations was holding the world captive on the issue when 80 per cent of the world was against it.
"Right now when drones are used, the humans are the ones looking at the computer screen through the machine's software, assessing the area, selecting a particular target and pressing the button for missile," said Thomas Nash of Article 36, a leading UK-based non-profit organisation working to prevent the unintended, unnecessary or unacceptable harm caused by certain weapons.
"But here we are talking about systems where it wouldn't necessarily be a human looking at the target or pressing the button. Those things would be pre-programmed based on complicated algorithms inside the machine and software," he said.
Human Rights Watch, Article 36 and other NGOs have called for a pre-preemptive ban on such weapons.
"There is precedent for this preemptive ban like with blinding lasers in 1990s. That is the model we are looking for," said Bonnie Docherty of Human Rights Watch pointing at the lack of accountability in using killer robots.
"One thing that strikes me about this issue is that there are interdisciplinary arguments (against this). There is moral, there is legal (arguments). Accountability being a legal argument. There is also the issues of arms race, issues of proliferation. It is the range of arguments that makes this a particularly compelling issue," said Docherty.
