Amnesty International is already pushing to ban killer robots


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Killer robots may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the prospect is much closer than many suspect. "[Lethal robots] aren't outside the realm of possibility," explains Rasha Abdul Rahim of Amnesty International, a humanitarian advocacy nonprofit. "They are only one step away from being autonomous and this is why people, and more importantly governments, need to start taking this issue seriously."
That's why Amnesty is pushing the United Nations to enact a preemptive ban on autonomous weapons, requiring the decision to kill to remain a human calculus. The U.N. has three weapons conventions scheduled for November.
Amnesty is not the first to warn against the dangers of lethal robots. Last year, scientist Stephen Hawking warned that artificial intelligence "could spell the end of the human race," and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has said that it is "potentially more dangerous than nukes."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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