Army of none: autonomous weapons and the future of war

Abstract

The debate around lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS)—how to define them, what they might look like and whether and how to regulate them—is emotive and divisive. The term ‘killer robots’—now in widespread parlance and intended to stigmatize rather than explain—obscures more than it reveals. But it resonates with the public, in part because of wider anxieties around the social and political consequences of artificial intelligence, robotics, big data and similar technologies. Paul Scharre's Army of none is not the definitive book on this subject, but it is the best primer available on a complex, contentious and rapidly evolving area. It is readable, balanced and lucid. Scharre is a former United States Army Ranger and also developed some of the earliest policy guidance on autonomy at the Pentagon. He is alive to the human and technological aspects of war, using his own experience with fraught patrols in Afghanistan to convey the delicate interplay of military and moral judgement on the battlefield that would confront autonomous weapons (pp. 2–4).