A/ State of the art

In the USA, the budget of the Ministry of Defense amounted to 609.9 billion dollars in 2014 against only 62 dollars for France. That has an impact on what the North Atlantic treaty does. Therefore, when the leader of one of his most advanced companies in the world speaks out in the field that has made him successful, it is legitimate to think that his words translate into reality, a research trail shared by many Defence actors and it is the inertia of the private sector that drives the balance of Member States.

As civilian technologies possibly captured by an autonomous weapons program, we can mention the industrialization of electric vehicles and domestic solar panels, which greatly increase the quality of batteries. Another example is the space program that increases the quality of satellite communications and tactical response. But also, the R&D involved around superconductors, flame dragons, armed turrets, drones and human-machine interfaces that improve the finesse of maneuvers. Finally, civil robotics and machine learning lay the foundations of cognition – and not of one’s own consciousness – of what is wrongly called artificial intelligence.

For the United States, autonomous armament is a military paradigm that is being prepared from the civilian space. The sub-units constituting separately the robot killer are not to serve its national sovereignty, nor the stock market. It is indeed once assembled that the author of the UN seizure argues of the reversal of the situation, which calls for more reflexion on the part of the shareholder.

B/ ..to Armed robots: an economy of the future filled with uncertainty

Behind this chapter, whose title could be inspired by a conference by astrophysicist Roland LEHOUCQ of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Elon Musk’s argument has the merit of clarity and honesty. It actually explains the foundations of a popular belief and its conditions of possibility. It enshrines machine learning not as a substrate of human creativity but as an empire in an empire. For the author, the deployment of robots that can open fire without human decision presupposes the denial of any moral perception.

Thus, the Presidency of the United Nations was asked informally to know the Security Council’s interpretation of this principle. Since UN directives influence the applicable law by member states, delegates have the values of international judges. The court judges morality precisely because a machine is amoral and it is for this incapacity that it is tried. The UN intervenes here in the internal representation (?) of the world by the machine in order to provide the fairest but not the best solution. The modification of this representation constitutes a rite of humanization of the machine ( i.e retro-control’s algorithm, remote operator, symbioton.) But some affirm exactly the opposite: the condition for judging is not to alter the comprehension of the facts in their totality. The system can only work if all social reasoning is discarded. So that the analysis focuses on the operations through which the machine invents and manufactures its own material. A device by which the repressive apparatus of the State establishes a vision of the world, pushes the machine to deny the external world which imposes itself on it and makes it more harmful.

Remind that America sits as a permanent member of the UN Council (Article 23, chapter 5 of the Organization Code¹) which uses an absolute majority voting method (Art. 7 ). So how to ensure that the decision rendered will be the best conventional weapon? What level of autonomy should be granted to automatic weapons? Who decides what is a moral activity or not for an armed machine?

These are important questions for the macro-economy, the real subject of killer robots. In the absence of verifiable answers available to investors, it is not conceivable to formulate a non speculative analysis over the long term.