Article 36 Podcast Article 36

In this episode we discuss the United Kingdom’s position on the question of regulating autonomous weapon systems. The Article 36 team is joined by guest Maira Folly, coordinator of the UK campaign to Stop Killer Robots, to talk about all the recent updates and movements on the UK political scene, including the the House of Lords’ creation of a Special Select Committee on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems.

In this podcast, Article 36 discusses progress in early 2023 towards a legally binding instrument to regulate autonomy in weapons systems. Richard Moyes and Uldduz Sohrabi go over the recently issued Communiqué by 33 Latin American and Caribbean states, the ReAim conference hosted by the government of the Netherlands, the upcoming Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) meetings, and discuss the work ahead.

This podcast is also available on Apple Podcast, Google Player, or any other podcasting platform.

In this episode, the Article 36 team discusses the second Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) meeting on autonomous weapons of 2023, which concluded on Saturday, 20th May. At the request of Russia, this meeting saw the exclusion of civil society and observers from the final negotiation of its report - a report that was predictably uninspiring. Richard Moyes, who attended the meeting in Geneva, provides a summary of the content of the report, and highlights that it fails to reflect the real momentum and energy we have already seen in 2023 towards a legal instrument on autonomous weapons.

In this episode, Article 36 discusses the intersessional working groups that are taking place in 2023 ahead of the Second Meeting of State Parties (2MSP). Policy advisor, Elizabeth Minor, who also collaborates with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) gives an update on the content of the meetings and the progress – highlighting the work that Article 36 has focused on in particular on Articles 6 & 7 on victim assistance, environmental remediation and international cooperation and assistance.

Applying force based on sensors is the connection between algorithmic decision and execution of kinetic force onto a target, which could be either a non-living target or a person. In this episode, we’ll be gaining insight into Article 36’s position on banning and regulating some weapons systems that apply force based on processing sensor inputs.

Target profiles are the way that autonomous weapons identify targets. They are the patterns of information from a system’s sensors that are supposed to match an intended target - or target type. This episode is talking about how these systems work, exploring the problems that arise when the complexity of the world, including people, is reduced into a pre-programmed pattern of data.