New Laws of Robotics proposed for US kill-bots

A new set of laws has been proposed to govern operations by killer robots. The ideas were floated by John S. Canning, an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, Dahlgren Division—an American weapons-research and test establishment.

Canning proposes that robot warriors should be allowed to mix it up among themselves freely, autonomously deciding to blast enemy weapon systems. Many enemy “systems” would, of course, be themselves robots, so it's clear that machine-on-machine violence isn't a problem. The difficulty comes when the automatic battlers need to target humans. In such cases Mr. Canning says that permission from a human operator should be sought.

“Let machines target other machines,” he writes, “and let men target men.”

Read full story in The Register