Robohub.org
 

Global majority want autonomous weapons banned: New report


by
11 November 2015



share this:
1024px-AGM-114_Hellfire_hung_on_a_Predator_drone-660x300

The majority of people are against the use of autonomous weapons capable of identifying and destroying targets without human input, according to a new survey by researchers at the University of British Columbia. 

This year, the Open Roboethics initiative conducted an international survey to engage members of the public in the discussion about lethal autonomous weapons systems — where the system makes the decision to use lethal force without requiring human intervention — and remotely operated weapons systems — those where a person in a remote location makes the decision.

With the help of numerous volunteer translators, we surveyed people’s opinions  in 14 different languages, and received responses from over a 1000 participants from 54 different countries. Although we did not collect a representative number of responses from all 54 countries, the aggregated results of our survey show that our respondents are reluctant to endorse the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons.

Find out about this year’s results on our summary report, The Ethics and Governance of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems.

You can also take a detailed look at the results and translations of our survey with our interactive web report.

Public opinion on this topic is important, and can change over time. Therefore, we want to continue to engage you in our discussions on this topic by keeping the survey open. Help us to continue the discussion by completing our multi-lingual survey and sharing the link with others:



tags: ,


Open Roboethics Initiative is a roboethics thinktank concerned with studying robotics-related design and policy issues.
Open Roboethics Initiative is a roboethics thinktank concerned with studying robotics-related design and policy issues.





Related posts :



Rethinking how robots move: Light and AI drive precise motion in soft robotic arm

  01 Oct 2025
Researchers at Rice University have developed a soft robotic arm capable of performing complex tasks.

RoboCup Logistics League: an interview with Alexander Ferrein, Till Hofmann and Wataru Uemura

and   25 Sep 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup league focused on production logistics and the planning.

Drones and Droids: a co-operative strategy game

  22 Sep 2025
Scottish Association for Marine Science is running a crowdfunding campaign for educational card game.

Call for AAAI educational AI videos

  22 Sep 2025
Submit your contributions by 30 November 2025.

Self-supervised learning for soccer ball detection and beyond: interview with winners of the RoboCup 2025 best paper award

  19 Sep 2025
Method for improving ball detection can also be applied in other fields, such as precision farming.

#ICML2025 outstanding position paper: Interview with Jaeho Kim on addressing the problems with conference reviewing

  15 Sep 2025
Jaeho argues that the AI conference peer review crisis demands author feedback and reviewer rewards.

Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

  11 Sep 2025
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence