Science fiction has made us vigilant of ‘killer robots’ in our midst, but they’re far closer than many of us realise.
American troops drive French Renault FT tanks to the battle line in the Forest of Argonne, France, September 26, 1918.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Armed forces around the world are exploring technological and biological enhancements to their soldiers. But this raises a number of serious ethical concerns, before, during and after conflict.
A discipline neither good nor evil.
Saturday Evening Post/Harris A. Ewing
Maybe you think neuroscience has a peaceable history of benign efforts to improve lives and enhance human capacities. But its origins and development tell a different story – with ethical implications.
DARPA is developing an autonomous anti-submarine warfare vessel, ACTUV.
DARPA
We need to ban lethal autonomous weapons, or “killer robots”, as we have done with biological weapons, land mines and blinding lasers, and Australia should take a leading role in making that happen.
Crewed submarines like the HMAS Rankin might become a thing of the past.
United States Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class David A. Levy
Autonomous submarines might do for naval warfare what drones are doing for air warfare. So should Australia consider autonomous subs as a replacement for the Collins class?
An eye in the sky from the movie of the same name – the reality of drone warfare.
Entertainment One
The moral and ethical dilemmas of future warfare are depicted in this tight British thriller. But what will happen when humans become more removed from the weapons of war?
A submarine missile-launching capacity brings the threat closer to the shores of the target country.
Flickr/Marion Doss
North Korea does not yet have the capacity to launch a nuclear missile from a submarine. Its recent test, however, suggests it is making progress to a game-changing second-strike capability.
The UK’s air assault on Islamic State (IS) began with two RAF Tornado GR4 bombers attacking targets in Iraq: one using a Paveway IV precision-guided munition (PGM) to destroy an IS heavy weapon position…
A MQ-9 Reaper Drone has an operational cost one-fifth of the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. So should drones replace soldiers in military warfare?
US Air Force
Cost is largely absent in the key debates around the use of unmanned drones in war, even though drones are a cost-effective way of achieving national security objectives. Many of the common objections…
It’s not a game: RAF pilots controlling a UAV at Kandahar Airport.
Defence Images
The Reaper drone pilot and sensor operator stared intently at the bank of screens in front of them, their concentration fixed on one individual. Their target had been identified by more than one intelligence…
Floating nuclear power station under construction.
Rosenergoatom
Though Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and gas, it is embarking on an ambitious and somewhat imaginative programme of building floating nuclear power stations. These are part of Russia’s…
Much of the current debate about drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) is about whether their deployment to countries such as Pakistan and Yemen is legal or ethical. This debate is predominantly focused…
Sorouq lost her sisters to bomb attacks in Syria, but the best way to help is to stay away.
Save the Children / Hedinn Halldorsson
A grief-stricken father tenderly hands over the shrouded body of his tiny daughter to be placed in the mass grave. Surgical masks are being worn in the hope that they will ward off the chemical death that…
Sendai, Japan after the 2011 tsunami: imagine nature’s destruction at the push of a button.
US Navy
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world…
The Legged Squad Support System has been designed to accompany war fighters into battle.
Boston Dynamics
On first viewing Boston Dynamics’ latest creation, the LS3 (Legged Squad Support System), I could not help but be taken back to the AT-AT (All Terrain Armoured Transport) walker, as depicted in the Star…
An LED light-trail shows a self-guiding bullet correcting its trajectory mid-flight.
Sandia National Laboratories
At the beginning of this year Sandia Labs in the United States announced it had patented a design for a self-guided bullet that could help soldiers at war. The technology is expected to prevent the need…
Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society & School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University