International treaty to curb military use of AI 'urgent and essential', Oireachtas committee to hear

A military weapons expert will argue that it would be difficult to hold human operators or companies accountable 'for the unpredictable actions of a machine they cannot understand'

Also, AI advisor to Unesco, Rosanna Fanni, will tell the committee that AI in warfare is not limited to the cultural idea of 'killer robots'. File photo

An international treaty to restrict the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for military decision-making and autonomous weapons is now “urgent and essential”, the Oireachtas AI Committee is set to hear.

Bonnie Docherty, a Harvard law lecturer and military weapons expert, is set to tell the committee that the use of autonomous weapons systems in peacetime would likely contravene international human rights law, in that humans could be “arbitrarily deprived of life” by a system operating without human reason.