Autonomous Weapons Systems

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am sorry that the noble Lord is disappointed, because I know the extent of his interest in this issue. I have tried to facilitate engagement with the department to enable him to better understand what the department is doing and why we take the views that we do. He will be aware that international consensus on a definition of laws has so far proved impossible. At this time, the UK believes that it is actually more important to understand the characteristics of systems with autonomy that would or would not enable them to be used in compliance with IHL, using this to set our potential norms of use and positive obligations.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, nations are sleepwalking to disaster. Engineers are already making autonomous drones the size of my hand that have cameras that act completely autonomously. They can, for example, have facial recognition and carry a small shaped charge, and will kill a person that that facial recognition shows. Once you release them, you release them and off they go. The firms producing these are talking in terms of, “Yes, if we had several thousands of these, gosh how wonderful, because we could kill a great chunk of a city without damaging it at all and get rid of the people there.” I find this quite horrifying. Also, these things are AI: they learn; therefore, they will learn how to kill even more than they have been programmed to. This is extremely dangerous. Do the Government agree completely that, wherever there is a kill-chain that ends up with a dead human being, there should be a human somewhere in that kill-chain to make that decision, rather than a robot?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

All weapon systems, whether with autonomous functions or not, must fully comply with the principle-based international humanitarian law framework. A robust application of that framework, I would suggest, is the best way of ensuring the lawful and ethical use of force in all circumstances. That applies to all states that might be developing autonomy in their weapons systems.