Pagers Attack: HALO Calls for Treaty Banning Autonomous Weapons

By James Cowan , CEO at The HALO Trust.

Yesterday’s attack in the Middle East highlights the urgent need to tackle the rise of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence.

The weaponisation of pagers may be a one-off, but this incident points to a much broader conflict phenomenon associated with the miniaturisation of explosive devices, their use in micro drones and the dawn of swarm technology linked to the AI autonomous revolution.??

?This is a fast-moving situation. The jury is still out on how these devices were made to explode. There may have been small amounts of explosive involved and an element of autonomy, or the batteries could have been made to ‘super-heat’, and therefore ignite, through radio messages sent by human hand. But whichever was the case,?legislation along the lines of the land mine ban is urgently necessary to catch up with this technology.

HALO’s success in tackling landmines came about in part because of the Landmine Ban Treaty, signed in Ottawa in 1997, a few months after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the leading supporter of a ban.?Later this year signatories to the treaty will meet in Cambodia to assess progress.???

The campaign to remove the threat of landmines from the world was, and remains, a singular example of international cooperation to control a class of weapons.? The world now urgently needs to replicate this example with a new treaty to control autonomous explosive devices.?

We do not have long to do this