UN Human Rights Lawyer's Report Calls for Moratorium on Killer Robots Peter James Spielmann - Associated Press
go to original May 2, 2013

UNITED NATIONS - Killer robots that can attack targets without any human input "should not have the power of life and death over human beings," a new draft U.N. report says.

The report for the U.N. Human Rights Commission deals with legal and philosophical issues involved in giving robots lethal powers over humans, echoing countless science-fiction novels and films. It was posted online this week.

Report author Christof Heyns, a U.N. human rights lawyer, calls for a worldwide moratorium on the "testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use" of killer robots until an international conference can develop rules for their use.

In the report, Heyns calls them "lethal autonomous robotics," or LARs for short, and says: "Decisions over life and death in armed conflict may require compassion and intuition. Humans - while they are fallible - at least might possess these qualities, whereas robots definitely do not."

Read the rest at Worldnow

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