Experts agreed on Wednesday at a specialist discussion on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) in the Bundestag that killing decisions should not be delegated to machines. Rather, the human conscience should continue to be burdened with such existential considerations. However, the researchers answered the question of how the loss of control of humans and thus the scenario of killer robots can best be prevented.

Highly automated systems at sea, on land and in the air are already in use or under development in many cases, reported Frank Flemisch from the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE). Germany is involved in this with the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) and the Leopard 2 successor. Often, with relevant solutions, “one slider can be pushed to the right in the direction of higher autonomy”.

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Uncontrollable hyperwar Flemisch, who is a representative of Germany in several NATO committees, sees the particularly dangerous thing in the military field in the accelerated warfare which could lead to a “hyperwar” with cyber components and attacks by large amounts of autonomously controlled systems and ultimately to a “nuclear holocaust”. The US has not only published white papers on this, but has also demonstrated a swarm of dohns baptized Perdix. These armed unmanned flying objects, which sounded like a horde of hornets, were fed target coordinates that could be changed again at lightning speed.

The “rifle” linked to such systems or the Russian hypersonic Avangard missile According to Flemisch, the Pandora “is clearly visible. It is unclear how quickly which power can extract “new things” from it. In any case, the Bundeswehr is worried that it will be overrun by systems like the Polish cavalry by German tanks at the beginning of World War II. At the same time, there are also concerns about being driven into an “arms race” that one might not be able to win against China, for example.

AWS for the “great war.” ” Even the Federal Ministry of Defense leaves gaps open in order to be able to fight at machine speed, complained the Dortmund peace researcher Jürgen Altmann. It only speaks of AWS if a combat system is primarily directed against people and can perceive, judge and learn its environment without any human influence or control. This opens up many research and development options for the German military. The definition of the International Red Cross is much broader. It describes a system “that can select and attack targets without human intervention”.

According to Altmann, those who promote AWS do so “not for asymmetrical battles, but for the great war”. There has long been a “virtual arms race” in this direction that could very soon become real. In addition to the USA, China and Russia, Pakistan and India were also preparing for the “Flash War”. The costs are “open to the top”. The most self-regulating effect could be that the “military is also interested in knowing what is happening on the battlefield”. The armed forces are therefore “somewhat divided”.

Escalation As a “dangerous climax” Johanna Polle from the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy AWS described the outsourcing of human tasks to computers. Combat situations could thus become more and more asymmetrical, and ultimately humans could be set against an autonomous killing robot. In any case, if a human operator is still provided, such systems leave “less time for intervention”. One of the consequences of security policy is that processes are becoming ever faster and more autonomous and rocking up.

Such implications of an automation spiral are “in the interest of no nation,” said Polles’ institute colleague Christian Alwardt. It is therefore important to “draw borders somewhere”. On the defensive side, AWS can also “disturb, jam, hack or shoot”, but then one is already in the middle of the dangerous cycle Institute for Theology and Peace with Deadly Autonomous Weapons. There is also an “unacceptable gap in responsibility”. From an ethical point of view, the disadvantages that resulted from AWS far outweigh its marginal advantages. The MPs therefore have every reason to advocate a ban on such systems and effective arms control.