There are some parts of life which most people would probably be happy to delegate to machines: filtering spammy emails, flagging old and forgotten subscriptions you’re still paying for, booking restaurant reservations, and so on. Simple, mundane tasks that won’t result in catastrophe when the bots inevitably screw up. In life-or-death situations, it’s probably unwise to give machines control over crucial decisions.
Yet that’s precisely what’s happening on modern battlefields, as many experts have begun to warn. AI is “on track to crowd out human decision-making” in warfare, Robin Geiss, director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), an independent research group within the UN, said during a press briefing in New York City on Tuesday.
“Are we going to let machines target and kill human beings?” he asked, calling that a “moral red line.” Handing sensitive military decisions to black box AI systems could make it more difficult for humans to prevent costly errors, Geiss noted—including when it comes to the most sensitive and dangerous arena of all: nuclear weapons.
N. Secretary General António Guterres on the subject of fully autonomous weapons systems, or “killer robots,” as Guterres called them. ” Pope Leo XIV made a similar plea in his Magnifica Humanitas encyclical earlier in the year, urging the global community to impose “the most rigorous ethical constraints” around the use of AI in warfare.
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