In partnership with Mines Action Canada, uOttawa researchers at CRAiEDL want to illustrate the ethical concerns around Autonomous Weapons Systems with a convincing immersive activity that replicates the experience of being targeted by “killer robots”.  

Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) are advanced, autonomous targeting and firing systems that operate independently of human agents and without manual control. These can include autonomous drone strikes that require no human decision-making at the time of the strike. With LAWS, the decision of who to kill does not require a human agent. The Stop Killer Robots has outlined nine Ethical Concerns with the use of these systems:  

Help them illustrate how ethically problematic these autonomous systems – killer robots! – are. Develop an immersive experience that subjects participants to these serious concerns.  

Your task is to develop an interactive, immersive experience using a Robomaster S1, in which participants (players) engage in a high stakes game of survival against an autonomous weapons system (the Robomaster S1). This experience should illustrate the ethical concerns associated with Autonomous Weapons Systems to help convince policymakers and governmental officials that AWS should be pre-emptively banned.  

This immersive experience challenges participants to survive interactions with Autonomous Weapons Systems. This experience should exemplify no fewer than three of the nine ethical concerns outlined above, challenge participants to reverse engineer the targeting logic, encourage participants to think through ways of disrupting the technology, facilitate co-operation between parties, and should be engaging and immersive. 

NOTE: You can think of the immersive experience as a “game”, but the goal here is to have participants (i.e. players) leave the experience feeling like they have lost, regardless of how successfully they participated.