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"Killer robots" could accidentally start the next world war and humans would be left powerless to stop it unfolding, a former Google software engineer has warned.

Laura Nolan, who resigned from the tech giant last year in protest at being assigned to a US military drone programme, is demanding all autonomous weapons are banned before they threaten to start World War Three.

While military drones can be controlled remotely by humans thousands of miles away in battle, she warned artificial intelligence could do “calamitous things” off their own accord.

“The likelihood of a disaster is in proportion to how many of these machines will be in a particular area at once,” she said.

“What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed.”

Ms Nolan, a computer science graduate from Trinity College Dublin, quit Google in 2018 after she was tasked with helping the US military increase its drone capabilities.

Project Maven, as it was known, attempted to develop ways for AI to analyse video footage from drones to more quickly differentiate between human and other targets in warfare. It was scrapped after 3,000 workers petitioned branding it unethical.

There is no suggestion that Google is involved in researching or developing any form of autonomous weapons systems.

Ms Nolan is a vocal member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group involved in high-level talks at the UN and Geneva about the prospect of World War Three being sparked by AI, and is calling for them to fall under the same strict international treaties as chemical weapons.

“You could have a scenario where autonomous weapons that have been sent out to do a job confront unexpected radar signals in an area they are searching,” she said.

“There could be weather that was not factored into its software or they come across a group of armed men who appear to be insurgent enemies but in fact are out with guns hunting for food.

“The machine doesn’t have the discernment or common sense that the human touch has. The other scary thing about these autonomous war systems is that you can only really test them by deploying them in a real combat zone.

“Maybe that’s happening with the Russians at present in Syria, who knows? What we do know is that at the UN Russia has opposed any treaty let alone ban on these weapons by the way.”

Bear Braumoeller, a professor of political science at The Ohio State University who has studied international warfare data tracing back 200 years, said the public has become too complacent about evergreen peacetime.

“We really don’t get how big a threat war is – not by a longshot,” he said. “The process of escalation that led to two world wars in the last century are still there.

“Nothing has changed. And that scares the hell out of me.”