On International Women's Day, weapons development won't be the first thing that springs to mind for achieving global gender equality. But banning autonomous weapons systems AKA "killer robots" is needed to strengthen global peace, advance human security and ensure a feminist future. Technology could be a benevolent force in our increasingly integrated society. The potential benefits of innovative advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning could secure our future. As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said: "…these new capacities can help us to lift millions of people out of poverty, achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and enable developing countries to leap‑frog into a better future."

The theme of this Year's conference is Autonomy and AI and is intended to encourage debate and analysis of the limits and safeguards that must be established when giving AI systems more autonomy. Such limits and safe- guards must be established for AI systems to progress in way that supports a just and prosperous society. This topic will be central on some invited talks, panels, sessions. An open letter signed by 116 founders of companies from 26 different countries warns that the development of lethal autonomous weapons, which can kill without direct human control, is proceeding at pace and that moves to ban them – in a similar way to chemical weapons – are moving too slowly. A key organiser of the letter, Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of NSW in Sydney, will release it at a gathering of world leading artificial intelligence (AI) experts in Melbourne on Monday.

The following letter was published in the Letters to the Editor of the February 2016 CACM (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/2/197433). Arguments for and against LAWS share this common foundation, but where Goose argued for a total ban on LAWS-related research, Ronald Arkin, in his "Counterpoint," favored a moratorium while research continues. Both sides accept international humanitarian law (IHL) as the definitive authority concerning whether or not LAWS represents a humane weapon. If I read them correctly, Goose's position was because LAWS would be able to kill on their own initiative they differ in kind from other technologically enhanced conventional weapons. That difference, he said, puts them outside the allowable scope of IHL and therefore ought to be banned.

It described as "fundamentally vague" Stephen Goose's ethical line in his Point side of the Point/Counterpoint debate "The Case for Banning Killer Robots" in the same issue. I encourage all ACM members to read or re-read them and consider if they themselves should be working on lethal autonomous weapons or even on any kind of weapon. Ronald Arkin's Counterpoint was optimistic regarding robots' ability to "... exceed human moral performance ...," writing that a ban on autonomous weapons "... ignores the moral imperative to use technology to reduce the atrocities and mistakes that human warfighters make." This analysis involved two main problems. First, Arkin tacitly assumed autonomous weapons will be used only by benevolent forces, and the "moral performance" of such weapons is incorruptible by those deploying them.