What’s happening in Ukraine moves us toward that dystopian future, Mr. Russell said. He is already haunted, he said, by Ukrainian videos of soldiers who are being pursued by weaponized drones piloted by humans. There’s often a point when soldiers stop trying to escape or hide because they realize they cannot get away from the drone.
“There’s nowhere for them to go, so they just wait around to die,” Mr. Russell said.
He isn’t alone in fearing that Ukraine is a turning point. In Vienna, members of a panel of U.N. experts also said they worried about the ramifications of the new techniques being developed in Ukraine.
Officials have spent more than a decade debating rules about the use of autonomous weapons, but few expect any international deal to set new regulations, especially as the United States, China, Israel, Russia and others race to develop even more advanced weapons. In one U.S. program announced in August, known as the Replicator initiative, the Pentagon said it planned to mass-produce thousands of autonomous drones.
“The geopolitics makes it impossible,” said Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top negotiator on autonomous weapons at the U.N. “These weapons will be used, and they’ll be used in the military arsenal of pretty much everybody.”
Nobody expects countries to accept an outright ban of such weapons, he said, “but they should be regulated in a way that we don’t end up with an absolutely nightmare scenario.”
