Are lethal autonomous weapon systems legal?
I want to know whether this technology is illegal, or not - specifically in the UK, but globally as well.
I know the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons held a conference in December, regarding the legalities of this technology, but did not hear of anything being determined. I also think the US has some military law regarding "meaningful human control."
While your question is primarily directed towards the use of legal autonomous weapons systems by military forces, I will address one tangential point (I may provide a separate answer on the military issues later).
There is a long standing (i.e. many hundreds of years old) common law rule of premises liability in Britain, which has now been incorporated by law into a statute and is also the law in almost every other common law jurisdiction, that creates liability to a person injured by a private parties using lethal autonomous weapons systems (i.e. deadly traps).
For example, the most ubiquitous "autonomous weapons system" is the anti-personal mine. These are illegal under the Ottawa Treaty which has been ratified by 40 nations including most of Europe, Africa, South & Central America, South-east Asia, Australia, Canada and Mexico so the use of anti-personnel mines by or against those nations constitutes a war crime.
Notably, the USA, Russia, China and India have not ratified the treaty so the use of such weapons by and against each other is not illegal.
