{"id":742166,"date":"2026-08-18T19:38:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T19:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/742166\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T19:38:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T19:38:09","slug":"autonomous-drones-and-the-future-of-war-in-an-ai-driven-world-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/742166\/","title":{"rendered":"Autonomous drones and the future of war in an AI-driven world | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stuart Russell is right that AI\u2019s builders fear losing control of it (Experts are warning: our AI arms race is putting humanity at risk, 11 August<\/a>). But it is not only a future superintelligence\u2019s problem; it is already loaded into weapons, where a loss of control kills a civilian today, not humanity tomorrow.<\/p>\n

An autonomous drone told to clear a \u201ckill box\u201d is the genie your other columnists described (How do we prevent AI agents from going rogue? It starts with a new kind of measurement, 18 July<\/a>): it does what it is told, killing whatever is inside, combatant or child. The gap between a target and a lawful target is the principle of distinction, which no instruction closes, because the instruction was lawful.<\/p>\n

Russell doubts asking a superintelligence how to control itself. In war the check need not be another opaque mind but a deterministic one: its rulebook the Geneva conventions, its judgments auditable, returned to a human. We need not trust it; we can check it. Some of us are working on it.<\/p>\n

A further danger is peculiar to war. Autonomy is sold as combat without our own dead, and a bloodless war is easier to start. But that is a fallacy: you can take the human from the targeting loop, not the nation from the war. Ground must be won and held; the dead still come, in attack or defence. Armies no longer go to war; nations do.<\/p>\n

If we cannot teach a drone to keep the laws of war, we will not teach a greater intelligence to keep faith with all we value. To abandon those laws for survival is the confusion of interests with values that our strategists warn against; here the two are one. Machines that kill without distinction, answerable to no one, leave no one safe. Our interests do not merely permit us to hold the line; they demand it.
Dr Darren Mann
Military surgeon, London<\/p>\n

Have an opinion on anything you\u2019ve read in the Guardian today? Please email<\/a> us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stuart Russell is right that AI\u2019s builders fear losing control of it (Experts are warning: our AI arms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-742166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}