A United Nations report has stated that an autonomous drone carried out an attack in Libya, making it the first recorded attack in military history by a robot.
While drones have been used frequently in a number of conflict zones in the past, this drone is thought to have been under its own guidance.
The drone is believed to have been Turkish-made. Turkey has backed several extremist groups involved in the Libyan civil war and is arming them in direct contravention of international law.
Military expert, Zachary Kallenborn, said of the attack:
"If anyone was killed in an autonomous attack, it would likely represent an historic first known case of artificial intelligence-based autonomous weapons being used to kill."
Ziya Meral of Britain's Royal United Services Institute added:
"It is time to assess where things are with Turkish drones and advanced warfare technology and what this means for the region and what it means for NATO."
Autonomous military machines pose a range of threats, and it is feared that they could target civilians, allow militaries to avoid moral accountability and become out of control.
Kallenborn states:
"Many people, including Steven Hawking and Elon Musk, have said they want to ban these sorts of weapons, saying they can't distinguish between civilians and soldiers, while others say they'll be critical in countering fast-paced threats like drone swarms and may actually reduce the risk to civilians because they will make fewer mistakes than human-guided weapons systems."
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists also condemned these weapons, adding:
"These types of weapons operate on software-based algorithms 'taught' through large training datasets to, for example, classify various objects. Computer vision programs can be trained to identify school buses, tractors, and tanks. But the datasets they train on may not be sufficiently complex or robust, and an artificial intelligence (AI) may 'learn' the wrong lesson."
It has been suggested by some analysts that Turkey may have engaged in autonomous drone activity in the territory of Artsakh where Turkey assisted Azerbaijan in attacking pro-Armenian forces.
[h/t: NPR]
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