THE US air force is seeking to develop a cluster weapon that releases a swarm of bomblets that could each pursue and destroy targets many kilometres away, New Scientist has learned.
“This is a dangerous and very worrying development,” says Noel Sharkey, a specialist in the ethics of autonomous systems at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Sharkey has argued that giving a robot the power to decide when and who to attack raises serious practical and ethical questions, and says the same would apply to the proposed weapon.
The US Department of Defense revealed its requirements for the…
