This statement was delivered at a hearing on "AI: Defense, Security and Cybersecurity” organized by the Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s National Parliament. The full hearing can be viewed here.
Thank you for the invitation to participate in this committee meeting. I am speaking on behalf of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and Human Rights Watch.
As artificial intelligence becomes commonplace on the battlefield, the prospect of machines making life-and-death determinations in armed conflict and law enforcement operations is moving rapidly toward reality. It is time for states to adopt a new treaty to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems. Ireland has expressed support for such an instrument in multiple international forums, including the Convention on Conventional Weapons, the UN General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, and the UNGA’s informal consultations on autonomous weapons systems. We would welcome additional support at the parliamentary level.
Autonomous weapons systems select and engage targets without human intervention. In other words, the systems apply force based on sensor processing rather than human inputs. They raise a host of legal, ethical, accountability, and security concerns.
Autonomous weapons systems would face obstacles complying with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war. They would find it challenging to distinguish between a combatant and a civilian because they could not interpret subtle behavioral cues, such as tone of voice or body language, as easily as humans who can relate to other people’s actions. It would be even more difficult for autonomous weapons systems to weigh the proportionality of an attack, i.e., whether civilian harm is excessive compared to military advantage, in quickly changing, complex situations. Such a subjective assessment requires human judgment.
The use of autonomous weapons systems in peacetime law enforcement operations would contravene the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of life, the foundation of international human rights law. It would fail to meet the right’s three-part test that force be necessary, proportionate, and a last resort.
From an ethical as well as legal perspective, allowing machines to determine who lives and dies undermines human dignity, which says that every person has inherent worth that should be respected. Machines cannot understand the true value of a human life because they are not themselves living beings. In addition, they would instrumentalize and dehumanize their targets by relying on algorithms that reduce people to data points.
Autonomous weapons systems would threaten the principle of non-discrimination. As shown by other AI technology, algorithmic bias can disproportionately and negatively affect already marginalized groups and discriminate against people based on such categories as race, sex, or disability.
All of these problems would be exacerbated because of a gap in accountability for any harm an autonomous weapons system caused. There are obstacles to holding individual operators criminally liable for the unpredictable actions of a machine they cannot understand. Legal challenges also exist to finding programmers and developers responsible under civil law.
Finally, autonomous weapons systems would heighten security risks because they could lower the threshold to war and lead to an arms race.
A legally binding instrument is needed to adequately address this plethora of problems. It should prohibit the autonomous weapons systems that inherently operate without “meaningful human control” and those that target people.
The treaty should regulate all other systems to ensure meaningful human control is always maintained over the use of force. The concept of meaningful human control encompasses criteria such as the ability to understand how a system works, to predict the outcome of its actions, and to limit the time and space of its operations.
More than 70 countries, including Ireland, have stated that that it is time to begin negotiations of a new legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons systems. We encourage parliament to welcome Ireland’s leadership on this front and to press the government for details on the concrete steps it will take to ensure negotiations take place.
Given the speed of technological development and gravity of the threat these systems pose, moving diplomatic discussions to formal treaty talks is urgent and essential.
