The US Air Force will shortly carry out the first test flight of a robot fighter jet, part of a long-term program to build uncrewed combat aircraft with the same capabilities as manned warplanes, New Scientist reports.
"Last-minute checks" are underway for the first flight tests of the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV), which are expected to take place in December, the British weekly says in next Saturday's issue.
The 120-million-dollar program aims at making fully armed, autonomous combat planes, the report says.
The initial aim is to develop an uncrewed plane that would fly ahead of, or alongside, piloted aircraft to destroy anti-aircraft defenses.
But New Scientist says it has learnt "the long-term goal" is "an uncrewed aircraft with the same capabilities as existing fighter planes."
The US Navy and Army have similar projects in development to make "armed autonomous helicopters and ground vehicles, including tanks," it adds.
The problem, however, is that present technology falls far short of the decision-making and identification powers of the human brain, it says.
Left to think by themselves, robot planes could inflict horrific casualties if, say, they were unable to distinguish between a truckload of civilians and a truckload of combatants or between a school and a bunker.
Under the Geneva Convention, indiscriminate firing of weapons is outlawed, and the UCAV program explicitly says the robot plane will be unable to take lethal action without prior consent.
But New Scientist says there is a worrying loophole in the program's technical specifications.
These say that "given prior consent, the UCAV operational system should be capable of autonomous self-defense actions and engagement of pop-up threats."
Defining who or what a "pop-up threat" is remains unclear, and the program's managers, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), says only that this will be a tactical question which will be settled by the air force, the report says.
"We are concerned," Joost Hiltermann, head of the arms division at Human Rights Watch in Washington, said. "Especially if the ability to pull the trigger occurs increasingly further away from the human." -- (AFP)
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