Terminators

Terminator-style machines that decide how, when and whom to kill are just around the corner, warned Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield. Action on a global scale must be taken to curb the development of military killer robots that think for themselves the leading British expert said today.

He fears that, far from helping to reduce casualties, their use is likely to make conflict and war more common and lead to a major escalation in civilian deaths.
“The next thing that’s coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots,” said Professor Sharkey, speaking to journalists in London.“People talk about programming the ’laws of war’ into a computer to give robots a conscience, so that if the target is a civilian you don’t shoot. But for a robot to recognise a civilian you need an exact specification, and one of the problems is there’s no specific definition of a civilian."

The US currently has 200 Predators and 30 Reapers and next year alone will be spending $5.5 billion (£3.3 billion) on unmanned combat vehicles.At present these weapons are still operated remotely by humans sitting in front of computer screens.But rapid progress was being made towards robots which took virtually all their own decisions and were merely “supervised” by humans. These would be fully autonomous killing machines reminiscent of those depicted in the “Terminator” films.
Last year the British aerospace company BAe Systems completed a flying trial with a group of drones that could communicate with each other and select their own targets. The United States Air Force was looking at the concept of “swarm technology” which involved multiple drone aircraft operating together.

Already we have heard a senior British judge, Lord Bingham, describing that the use of UAVs as weapons is "cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance"


All wars are anti-working class. Not just because of why they are fought but in the ways they are fought. War produces inhumanity.To object to some weapons which might be used in wars, whilst implicitly tolerating others is to accept the inevitability of war, and the social system which underpins it.By what contorted logic does "manner of death" come to mean more than "fact of death"? The only "worthwhile" war is the class war—the fight against war.