Turkish-made drone could attack humans without orders - Pentagon report

 

Source: Ahval
May 30 2021

The Pentagon has released a report warning that autonomous drones could mistakenly attack civilians unless measures are taken to ensure their programming, Fox News reported on Sunday.

"How brittle is the object recognition system? How often does it misidentify targets?" the report asked.

Last year in Libya, a Turkish-made autonomous weapon—the STM Kargu-2 drone—may have “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating soldiers loyal to the Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, according to a recently released UN document, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported in May.

“The Kargu-2 signifies something globally significant: A new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence,” the report points out.

As of this writing, no autonomous weapon has yet been used to kill a human being.

The UN report calls the Kargu-2 a lethal autonomous weapon. “It’s maker, STM, touts the weapon’s “anti-personnel” capabilities in a grim video showing a Kargu model in a steep dive toward a target in the middle of a group of manikins.

There have been calls to ban autonomous drones, because they could kill without being able to distinguish between soldiers and civilians. They work on machine-language learning programmes which have to be ‘trained’ by repetitive operations.

Devices using such programmes have been known to make bad decisions. Regulation on a global scale is needed before swarms of autonomous drones are let loose and make the wrong decision about who to kill, the report concludes.