The next president will have a range of issues on their plate, from how to deal with growing tensions with China and Russia, to an ongoing war against ISIS. But perhaps the most important decision they will make for overall human history is what to do about autonomous weapons systems (AWS), aka "killer robots." The new president will literally have no choice. It is not just that the technology is rapidly advancing, but because of a ticking time bomb buried in US policy on the issue.

In 2012, the Obama administration created Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, which sets policy on how the Pentagon handles the questions of this new technology. However, the directive has a 5-year limit, meaning that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will need to decide what the US policy on killer robots will be within the first year of their term.

It sounds like science fiction to think that a president will have to wrestle with the idea of robots outside of direct human control taking on a combat role, but that is where the technology is headed. Just as we see the increasing use and acceptance of driverless cars, the same is playing out in the realm of war. The US military already has more than 10,000 unmanned aerial systems (aka "drones") in its inventory and another 12,000 on the ground. Early versions, like the Predator, were almost completely remote controlled, but each new version has gained in intelligence and autonomy. While we are not in the world of the Terminator, robots have already shown the ability to do complex tasks on their own, such as take off and land from aircraft carriers and track targets, be they anything from a human to a submarine. Many air defense and cybersecurity roles are almost completely automated already.

WIRED OPINION

About

Heather M. Roff is a research scientist at Arizona State University, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, and a fellow at New America. Peter W. Singer is strategist at New America and the author of Ghost Fleet.

Indeed, by our count the US military is working on at least 21 different projects to increase the autonomous capacities of weapons systems in war. And just last week, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board released a major new study on what it thinks should be the future of robotics, concluding that "autonomy will deliver substantial operational value across an increasingly diverse array of DoD missions, but the DoD must move more rapidly to realize this value."

Policy's Global Reach

This revolution is global, though; American efforts are being paralleled by research and deployments of increasingly capable systems from nations around the world. Just this summer, China's military leaders talked up their plan to put artificial intelligence into their new cruise missiles, Russia's Foundation for Advanced Studies (that country's version of DARPA) displayed work on what they call "Iron Man" humanoid robots, while even Iraq showed off a new armed ground robot, a crude remote-operated mini-tank called "Alrobot" (Arabic for robot).