Less autonomy. More humanity.

Machines don’t see us as people, just another piece of code to be processed and sorted. From smart homes to the use of robot dogs by police enforcement, A.I. technologies and automated decision-making are now playing a significant role in our lives. At the extreme end of the spectrum of automation lie killer robots.

Killer robots don’t just appear – we create them. If we allow this dehumanisation we will struggle to protect ourselves from machine decision-making in other areas of our lives. We need to prohibit autonomous weapons systems that would be used against people, to prevent this slide to digital dehumanisation.

Tech like facial recognition favours light-skinned and outwardly masculine faces over darker-skinned and outwardly feminine faces. And, while efforts will be made to diversify data sets, this is not just a case of unrepresentative data. A.I. technologies are reinforcing existing institutional patterns of discrimination. Stereotypes are entrenched by automated decision-making.

New law is needed on autonomy in weapons systems to create boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable. This is fundamental to preventing digital dehumanisation and further cycles of oppression and violence. We should be challenging structures of inequality, not embedding them into weapons.

Whether on the battlefield or at a protest, machines cannot make complex ethical choices, they cannot comprehend the value of human life. Machines don’t understand contexts or consequences: understanding is a human capability – and without that understanding we lose moral engagement and we undermine existing legal rules.

Ensuring meaningful human control means understanding the technologies we use, understanding where we are using them, and being fully engaged with the consequences of our actions. Life and death decisions should not be delegated to a machine. It’s time for new international law to regulate these technologies.