Through this new performance work artist Tom Estes expands on some of the issues

explored in a new report from the United Nations Human Rights Commission which suggests

that weapons systems that can attack targets without any human input need to be regulated.

Airborne drones are becomin especially in the military. A new report from the

United Nations Human Rights Commission suggests that lethal autonomous robots need to be

regulated before they become the military weapons of the future. The report — which was

debated at the Human Rights Council in Geneva on May 29 — states that the United States,

Israel, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Japan all possess lethal robots that are either

fully or semi-autonomous.

Some of these machines — or “lethal autonomous robotics” (LARS), as they are called in the

report — can allegedly choose and execute their own targets without human input. According

to a new draft UN report, killer robots that can attack targets without any human input “should

not have the power of life and death over human beings”.

The Reports author Christof Heyns, a South African professor of human rights law, calls for a

worldwide moratorium on the “testing, production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment

and use” of killer robots until an international conference can develop rules for their use.