have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.
Ukraine's digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, agrees that fully autonomous killer drones are "a logical and inevitable next step" in weapons development. He said Ukraine has been doing "a lot of R&D in this direction." "We have not crossed this line yet – and I say ‘yet’ because I don’t know what will happen in the future." said Honchar, whose group has spearheaded drone innovation in Ukraine, converting cheap commercial drones into lethal weapons.Russia could obtain autonomous AI from Iran or elsewhere. The long-range Shahed-136 exploding drones supplied by Iran have crippled Ukrainian power plants and terrorized civilians but are not especially smart.
"The technology to achieve a fully autonomous mission with Switchblade pretty much exists today," said Wahid Nawabi, CEO of AeroVironment, its maker. That will require a policy change — to remove the human from the decision-making loop — that he estimates is three years away.Drones can already recognize targets such as armored vehicles using cataloged images.
"I don’t think they’d have any scruples," agreed Adam Bartosiewicz, vice president of WB Group, which makes the Warmate. Toby Walsh, an Australian academic who campaigns against killer robots, hopes to achieve a consensus on some limits, including a ban on systems that use facial recognition and other data to identify or attack individuals or categories of people.