Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch, Noel Sharkey of the International Committee on Robot Arms Control, and Jody Williams of the Nobel Women’s Initiative will lobby the UN to ban lethal robots. Image: Campaign to Stop Killer Robots/Flickr
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She argued that throughout history, war and weapons were forged by men, and that’s not going to change until a more diverse perspective is included in the defense and security decisions shaping the future."Men make war, men make the weapons to make war, and men make money from making the weapons that fuel war," Williams said. "When they don't include women's voices in the discussion, then it's all men talking to each other with their testosterone and their weapons systems. And they all love them."She argued that women address the issue from a slightly different perspective. "We bring strong discussion of morality and ethics that wouldn't be happening otherwise."Well, I'm not sure about that. Plenty of men are interested in the ethics of robots, killer ones and otherwise. But that viewpoint can get cloudy when there’s billions of dollars to be made from ethically-questionable machines like autonomous decision-making drones that drop bombs, Williams argued."We really do believe that sustainable peace is possible, but not if you listen to men who are used to seeing a weapon they think is cool and pursuing it," she said. "A whole bunch of men congratulating each other on their expertness and many of them supporting the military-industrial complex … supporting their belief that they can make any weapon they want, unless, once they've made it, they figure out it might violate law.""It's their perspective that we're going to hear over and over and over again and is going to shape the debate," she said.That may be an extreme way to put it, but doesn’t change the fact that gender inequality in positions of real power is pervasive: from disarmament to engineering to foreign policy and so on.So what to do about it? As Wareham told me, simply pointing out the lack of diversity at the conference—ethnic diversity, too—is a start. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has also compiled a list of female experts on lethal robots to make it easier for the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons to include a more gender-balanced perspective next time around.“Just keep nipping at their heels,” Williams said. "Peacefully, of course.""Somehow it implies that women are not capable of being seriously involved in creating our own security in a secure world. To be blunt, I find it fucking offensive."