MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. The use of drones on the battlefield creates a fundamentally new situation in the rules and ethics of war: people distance themselves from what's happening, the threshold for the use of force is lowered, and moral responsibility is blurred, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev noted in an article for Expert Magazine.
"All this has created a fundamentally new situation in the rules and ethics of warfare," he wrote, commenting on the active development and deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). "In the near future envisioned by experts, drones will radically distance the killer from the victim, turning the act of violence into something like a thrilling shooter. This ‘remote warfare’ creates a dangerous psychological barrier, lowering the threshold for the use of force and completely blurring moral responsibility."
With the use of drones, the concept of "war" as an existential risk for its participants dissolves, creating the illusion of "clean" and "almost bloodless" conflicts, Medvedev stated.
"Furthermore, delegating death decisions to artificial intelligence algorithms in autonomous combat systems not possessing (yet!) consciousness and lacking mercy and compassion creates an eschatological paradox of empowering a machine to independently decide matters related to the life and death of a person, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council noted. "How this aligns with the norms of international humanitarian law, codified in the Hague Conventions and Declarations of 1899 and 1907, the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and whether new international treaties are necessary in this regard—that’s a rhetorical question.".