An Independent opinion piece by Johann Hari on killer robots being deployed in conflict zones has raised some disturbing questions on warfare. According to him, no robots were being used in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Today, the US army has 12,000 of them, responsible for executing 33,000 missions in a year. NATO has also used a range of robots in warzones which were mainly created by the British Ministry of Defence labs that was privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. They include the air drone attacks allowing operators from afar to drop bombs or the on-the- ground human-sized robot, SWORDS, with 360 degrees vision that has machine-gun capabilities. The next step of advancing war robotics sounds more like science fiction though is becoming a possibility - building in 'autonomy' within these robots. This means that if these robots are disabled (perhaps due to blocking signals by insurgents), they would be able to make their own decisions. As the US Joint Forces has claimed, such robots would become the norm in 20 years time.

As it is, the use of robots in today's warzone has already generated enough ethical concerns amongst scientists. A group calling itself, International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has been formed 'to campaign for limits on robotic military hardware'. One of its founders is Dr Robert Sparrow, a senior lecturer in Australia's Monash University. In an interview on the ethics of using robots in the military, he touched on the possibility of giving 'autonomy' to these killer machines (more after jump):

'... but this is unlikely to remain the case for too much longer [systems rely upon having human beings “in the loop”] ; in the longer term, systems that can operate without a human controller will be more deadly and survivable than those that rely upon a link to a human controller. Eventually we will see an “arms race to autonomy” wherein control of the weapons will be handed over to on-board expert systems or artificial intelligences. A whole other set of ethical issues will arise at that point'.

PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, has written a book, 'Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century', posing the same moral dilemmas. In an interview with Democracy Now! he talks about lowering standards of war and changing public’s perception of war due to these advanced technology. Another concern which is still not widely debated is the lack of an international legal framework on robot killings in warzones. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of these robotic advancements is its corporation creators, supposedly a growing industry which is not limited to the traditional defense contractors in the US, but also found in other forty-three countries. He argues that the increasing use of military contractors, war robots  and child soldiers are changing the nature of war -  being fought in the name of governments to private corporations e.t.c. :

'... One is that the sands are shifting underneath us in warfare, and we’re in denial about it. We have an assumption of who fights wars, and it’s usually a man in a uniform, and that means, oh, well, he’s part of a military, and he must be fighting on behalf of a government, and it must be politics and patriotism. But look at, for example, the rise of the private military industry. That is someone who’s fighting not on behalf of a government, but a private corporation. Profit motive is involved. Child soldier is another breakdown. Ten percent of the combatants in the world today are children. You know, war is not an adult game anymore. And then, with robotics, it’s sort of the ultimate breakdown of humankind’s 5,000-year-old monopoly on war'.

More importantly, these changes are aimed at deflecting public pressure against war:

'... the use of contractors, as well as the movement towards machines, is, in a sense, a sort of outsourcing of responsibility, an outsourcing of risk, trying to avoid some of the political costs that go to war. You know, I’m often asked, “Well, does this save us money?” Well, that’s not the right question on either the contractor issue nor the digital issue. We aren’t using these systems because simply they save money. It’s because they allow us to avoid certain political costs'.