Britain will not support pre-emptive ban on 'killer robots', MoD says after experts urge UN to act

Britain will not support a pre-emptive ban on ‘killer robots’, the Ministry of Defence has said, despite more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts calling on the United Nations to outlaw development of the machines.

The MoD said existing international law was enough to deal with the spectre of military machines that could one day identify, target and kill without human control.

One leading British robotics academic called on the Government to hold a wholesale review of its policy.

Letter signed by 116 people

Some of the world’s leading technology luminaries signed an open letter to the UN calling for the ban on autonomous weapons to try to stop an arms race.

The letter, signed by 116 people including Elon Musk the chief of Tesla, and Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of Google's DeepMind, said robots would herald a “third revolution in warfare”, after gunpowder and nuclear weapons.

They wrote: “Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.

“These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.

“We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”

The Ministry of Defence said Britain had no intention of building, or buying fully autonomous weapon systems, but also did not support a pre-emptive ban.

Prof Noel Sharkey, chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, said: “If you are not going to use them, why would you let other people use them?

He went on: “What the Government needs to do is seek alternative expert opinion than the MoD that are pushing a specific agenda and then out of that, develop a national policy towards these weapons.”

An MoD spokesman said: “It’s right that our weapons are operated by real people capable of making complex decisions and, even as they become increasingly high-tech, they will always be under human control.”