IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 61

deployed sometime in the future. Crootof [20] provides a
promising avenue for discussion by signaling the need
for war torts to deal with the accountability gap. A tort is
an act or omission that causes injury or harm to a person or an organization, i.e., a wrong for which courts can
impose legal liability on the party that commits the tortious act. Crootof elaborates:
Just as the Industrial Revolution fostered the
development of modern tort law, autonomous
weapon systems highlight the need for "war torts":
serious violations of international humanitarian
law that give rise to state responsibility.
Due to space limitations, I will not discuss this issue
in further detail here and refer the interested reader to
the aforementioned source.

Current Technology does not Meet
Conditions Under IHL
The argument I have tried to make here in favor of a preemptive ban is that today's technology does not meet
the necessary conditions for permissible killing under
IHL. Since today's AWSs would likely fail to discriminate,
they would not comply with international humanitarian
law, hence they should be considered both illegal and
ethically impermissible. However, meeting the key criterion of discrimination is not in itself a sufficient condition
for ethical killing. Even if an autonomous system could
outperform humans regarding discrimination, this would
not entail that the use of force is morally justified per se.
According to the tiered nature of just war theory, in order
for the killing of an enemy combatant to be permissible,
the combatant has to, for example, constitute a real
threat, or the killing has to yield a proportional strategic
advantage. Also, even in the case of AWSs becoming statistically better than humans at discriminating, many
persuasive deontological arguments could be made for a
principled bound on autonomous machine killing: the
authority to initiate lethal force should not be delegated
to an unsupervised automated process as an AWS is
unable to establish a relevant interpersonal relationship
of respect [11], [21], [22].
If my argument so far has been sound, I have at
least shown that the technical incapacity of current
AWSs at discriminating is sufficient reason to question
the use of AWSs and to call for a ban - or at least a
moratorium on their use - that would minimize the
harm inflicted on unlawful targets, and give researchers, civil society, and policy makers more time to
engage in a discussion around the deeper philosophical issues at stake: e.g., whether AWSs are compatible
with the requirement of respect for the humanity of
combatants and non-combatants [22].
MARCH 2018

∕

Author Information
The author is a senior lecturer and researcher at ELISAVA
Barcelona School of Design and Engineering (Pompeu
Fabra University), Spain. Email: aguersenzvaig@
elisava.net.

References

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93-116, 2016.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

http://www.futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons/ http://www.futureoflife.org/open-letter-autonomous-weapons/ http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-policy-essay-south-korean-sentry%E2%80%94-killer-robot-prevent-war https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-policy-essay-south-korean-sentry%E2%80%94-killer-robot-prevent-war https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-policy-essay-south-korean-sentry%E2%80%94-killer-robot-prevent-war http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/accelerating-innovation-and-powering-new-experiences-with-ai/ http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/accelerating-innovation-and-powering-new-experiences-with-ai/ http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/accelerating-innovation-and-powering-new-experiences-with-ai/

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