Jody Williams and Mary Wareham were leading lights in the campaign to ban landmines. Now they have autonomous weapons in their sights

It sounds like something from the outer reaches of science fiction: battlefield robots waging constant war, algorithms that determine who to kill, face-recognition fighting machines that can ID a target and take it out before you have time to say “Geneva conventions”.

This is no film script, however, but an ominous picture of future warfare that is moving ever closer. “Killer robots” is shorthand for a range of tech that has generals salivating and peace campaigners terrified at the ethical ramifications of warfare waged via digital proxies.

Now, two women armed with nothing more than a Nobel prize, knowhow and a lot of conviction are standing in front of the march of deadly killer robots. They want them banned. And they’ve done this kind of thing before.

Jody Williams won her Nobel for leading the long, global effort to get anti-personnel landmines banned. Mary Wareham was a prominent supporter in that campaign.

“We were there at the Nobel peace prize ceremony,” Wareham recalls, “and I said to Jody, ‘This is how you finish your career, not start it! What are we going to do now?!’”

The answer? Lethal autonomous weapon systems, also known as Laws. The women expect the struggle to be far harder. “In relative terms, landmines are chump change,” Williams says, pointing to the billions of dollars manufacturers could make selling AI-enhanced weapons.

Artificial intelligence is already spreading rapidly through policing, healthcare, farming and social work. AI experts are cautioning that militaries will be next.

The big question is: what would stop armies from deploying upgraded drone bots to search for, identify, and then take out every man in a village between the ages of 18 and 50? Or to send a killer drone to ID and assassinate a head of state? Weapons manufacturers are riding the same artificial intelligence wave as other industries. Militaries, eyeing each other in a quiet but fierce arms race, are funding some of the most cutting-edge trials.

To some, the advantages are clear: killer robots would never fatigue like a human soldier. They could potentially stay out on the battlefield for months. They would never get angry or seek revenge. They would never defy an officer’s orders. They would remove the imperfect human from the equation. Algorithms would determine who to kill.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israel’s Guardium unmanned security vehicle can make its own decisions and is used to patrol borders. Photograph: Nir Elias/Reuters

But other military experts have expressed concerns. “There are not only legal and ethical concerns about lethal autonomy, but practical ones as well,” says Paul Scharre, a former US army ranger who wrote the Pentagon’s earliest policy statement on killer robots. “How does one control an autonomous weapon? What happens if there’s a glitch in the system or someone hacks it?”

To Williams, the machines represent the very definition of cold-blooded slaughter. With killer robots, World War III would allow little space for what shred of humanity surfaces in wars. There will be no Christmas truce along the western front in any 21st century conflict.

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“It’s men getting hard-ons over new weapons,” seethes Williams. “They’re doing it simply because they can. They’re doing it because they want to see where it can go.”

Israel already has some of the most advanced machines, including an armed ground robot that has patrolled the Gaza border and the Harpy, a missile that circles the skies until it finds its target. Marketed ostensibly to destroy enemy radars, no technical barriers exist to stop engineers in the industry from developing similar weapons that would one day attack people.

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In the valleys of central California, the US military is running drone swarm experiments. Russia has declared its desire to form an entire battalion of killer robots. And no one really knows what China is doing.

No law governs this AI arms race. Countries currently face a free-for-all.

Scientists have sounded the alarm, and more than 250 research and academic institutions and 3,000 prominent players in the field have called for a ban on killer robots.

But beyond a petition, activists reckon the best way to stop this technology in its tracks is through the tedious, unheroic task of passing an international treaty. That is the strategy of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. More than 100 organisations in 54 countries have joined the coalition, with the aim of getting a deal by 2021.

Williams is an idealist, but she is not naive. She has battled the military-industrial complex since her days protesting the Vietnam war. Sceptics had thought banning landmines would be impossible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Activists from the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots protesting in Berlin on 21 March. Photograph: Annegret Hilse/Reuters

“Anything is inevitable if you do nothing to stop it,” she says. “When they were drumming that at us — ‘it’s inevitable, it’s inevitable’ — the reason people do that is to disempower you.”

In that campaign, Williams and others had lobbied the United Nations to pass an agreement. When that process flagged, they took negotiations outside the UN framework and began corralling countries on board, one by one, until a historic deal in Ottawa in 1997 when more than 120 nations committed to eradicating anti-personnel landmines.

Today, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is following a similar roadmap. The UN has held several rounds of talks in Geneva, including a session at the end of March. But the CSKR has lost faith in that process, and is now focusing on individual western states.

Williams and Wareham hope Germany will take the lead. The country joined the UN security council at the start of the year, and its foreign minister, Heiko Maas, cares about the issue. He recently called killer robots “nothing less than an attack on humanity itself”.

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Behind the scenes, Berlin has reached out to other states to push for more progress. At least some politicians in Germany recognise it has the opportunity to be the first country to ban killer robots and if it does, other European states would follow suit. But the country has also, at times, acted with uncertainty on the matter, especially in its discourse at the UN.

In part to put Germany on the spot, members of the CSKR came together in Berlin last month to drum up public support. Standing in front of the organisation’s own “friendly” robot mascot, Williams urged the crowd before her to reach out to their political representatives and to spread the word.

“People freak out over the word ‘activism’,” Williams told them. “All it means is ‘to act.’”

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