Killer Robots and the Future of War

Sebastian Thrun and his students developed Stanley, a robot that in 2005 won the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge for driving itself across a 132-mile, winding course. He is a research professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow. At Google, Thrun founded Google X, which is home to radically innovative projects like the Google self-driving car. He is also the co-founder of online educational company Udacity, and the CEO of Kitty Hawk, which works on flying cars.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum

Dr. Paul Scharre served as an infantryman, sniper, and reconnaissance team leader in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and completed multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He later worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense helping to establish policies on autonomous systems and new weapons technologies. Today, he is Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is the award-winning author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.  

Ronald Arkin is a roboticist and one of the country’s leading roboethicists. He is the Regents' Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he studies behavior-based control, action-oriented perception for mobile robots, robot survivability, multiagent robotics, human-robot interaction, and more. He has also held positions at robotics labs in Stockholm, Tokyo, and Toulouse, France.

Mary “Missy” Cummings was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots, serving from 1988-1999. She is currently at Duke University, where she is the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory (HAL) and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Mary Wareham serves as the global coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. She is the Advocacy Director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, where she leads advocacy against weapons that pose a significant threat to civilians. Previously, Wareham served as Advocacy Director for Oxfam New Zealand, leading its efforts to secure an arms trade treaty and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Ash Carter served as the 25th U.S. Secretary of Defense, from 2015 to 2017, after serving as the number two and three positions in the Pentagon. A Rhodes Scholar who received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he for more than 35 years used his expertise in national security and technology to defend the United States, under presidents of both political parties as well as in the private sector. Today, Carter is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and also an Innovation Fellow at MIT.