LAWS should never be developed or used. LAWS should never be used in anger.
Those are just a few of the responses researchers at the University of British Columbia got when they asked the Internet-using public about the military use of Lethal, Autonomous WeaponsSystems - Terminator-style killer robots, in layman's terms.
The survey itself sheds some interesting light on people's attitudes - 11 percent of respondents say they'd rather be under attack from robots that could control themselves rather than robots that were being operated by humans - but it's impossible to read the study without getting the nagging feeling that LAWS is just, well, not the acronym you want to be using if you're trying to warn people about the dangers of deadly artificial intelligence.
Laws, which are of course distinct from LAWS, are necessary. Any well-functioning society requires them. So to say that LAWS pose "a matter of democratic and humanitarian concern" is not wrong per se, but it could be misleading.
For one thing, the military already uses the LAW acronym - to refer to the light anti-tank weapon. So, in the minor interest of our species' survival, I'm launching an effort to rebrand killer robots to better reflect their true nature.
