TEST SERIES 
Date : 19 Dec 2021
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
Tags :Why in News?
- This year, for the first time, a majority of the 125 nations that belong to an agreement called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons said they wanted curbs on killer robots.
- But they were opposed by members that are developing these weapons, most notably the United States and Russia.
- The United Nations has been hosting diplomatic talks in Geneva since 2017 aimed at reaching an agreement on how to address the use of killer robots.
What is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons?
- It is also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention.
- It is a framework of rules that ban or restrict weapons considered to cause unnecessary, unjustifiable, and indiscriminate suffering, such as incendiary explosives, blinding lasers, and booby traps that don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians.
- The convention has no provisions for killer robots.
What exactly are killer robots?
- Opinions differ on an exact definition, but they are widely considered to be weapons that make decisions with little or no human involvement. Rapid improvements in robotics, AI, and image recognition are making such armaments possible.
Geneva Conference
- The conference devise ways to regulate, if not prohibit, the use of killer robots under the convention.
- It was the culmination of years of discussions by a group of experts who had been asked to identify the challenges and possible approaches to reducing the threats from killer robots.
- But the experts could not even reach an agreement on basic questions.
