2. August 2019

On July 18, 2019, Regina Surber of ICT4Peace and the Zurich Hub for Ethics and  Technololgy (ZHET)   gave a one-hour lecture on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and the United Nationals Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) Process on LAWS at the Global Negotiation Conference at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

The Global Negotiation Conference aims to promote the interdisciplinary study of practical and theoretical negotiation to students from all over the world. The first two days of the three-day conference consisted of a series of presentations and workshops by leading academics and practitioners of negotiation topics, including psychology in negotiations, game-theory in negotiation, or digital negotiation, followed by a multiparty simulation of the current UN GGE debate on LAWS. The conference program included presentations from Mircea Geoana (Deputy Secretary General of NATO), Ambassador Dennis Ross (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy) or Professor Michael Ambühl (Negotiation and Conflict Management at ETH Zurich).
Regina Surber’s lecture on LAWS and the UN GGE Process marked the main thematic introduction into the negotiation topic. The lecture gave both a broad as well as in-depth overview over, i.a., the unique technological, legal, philosophical and security problems resulting from autonomous software as the heart of a LAWS, the military (economic) interests in developing and using LAWS in war as well as during law enforcement operations, and the diplomatic show of strength at the UN GGE. Further, it covered the highly important questions regarding potential definitions of LAWS and the related idea/reality-problematic, the limitations of the UN GGE understanding and handling of LAWS, as well as the crucial widening of topics – the convergence of further emerging technologies into a new weapons landscape and the reality of future warfare. The recording of the lecture is below:

See also Regina’s paper on AI, LAWS and Peace Time Threats here.

And Barbara Weekes’ paper on Digital Human Security here.