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Slippery Slope: The arms industry and increasingly autonomous weapons
This report analyses developments in the arms industry, pointing to areas of work that have potential for applications in lethal autonomous weapons and shows the trend of increasing autonomy in weapon systems.
The development of increasingly autonomous weapons has raised deep concerns and has triggered an international debate regarding the desirability of these weapons. Lethal autonomous weapons systems, popularly known as killer robots, would be able to select and attack individual targets without meaningful human control.
This is an important debate in which the arms industry plays a key role, as the developers of new weapon technologies and suppliers of weapon systems to the military. To ensure that this debate is fact-based and productive, weapon producers should articulate and publicise clear policies on their stance, clarifying where they draw the line to ensure that humans keep control over the use of force by weapons systems.
This publication can be found on the PAX website here.
...there is an urgent need for all arms companies to speak out on this issue as well as develop clear policies and concrete measures to ensure meaningful human control over the weapons systems they develop, produce and sell.
