Nearly 130 countries on Saturday agreed on a text defining lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) - “killer robots” to their critics - a first step towards talks on a possible international treaty to regulate them.
I think we all know what the problem is going to be here. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.
US, China and Russia won’t sign it. The longer I live the more I wonder why small countries want to handicap themselves against aggression this way. Any country will withdraw from this, same as with mines and cluster munitions, when they get a whiff of being threatened. By then they will be late in development of those new weapons and forced to buy them from US or China or Russia, to double the irony.
I really think that this is one of those “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” type situations. Any attempt to keep it from happening is good, but I do think that it’s far too late.
The treaties for landmines and nuclear weapons have had some effect. I think, maybe.
The treaties are only good for as long as people think they don’t need the weapons.
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot of non-nuclear countries that either have, or can very very quickly put together a nuclear weapon.
