Country officials and campaigners have expressed disappointment after United Nations talks on autonomous weapons systems – known as “killer robots” – stopped short of launching negotiations into an international treaty to govern their use following opposition from manufacturing states.

Unlike existing semi-autonomous weapons such as drones, fully-autonomous weapons have no human-operated “kill switch” and instead leave decisions over life and death to sensors, software and machine processes…

But on Friday, the Sixth Review Conference on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) failed to schedule further talks around the development and use of the Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, or LAWS.

Countries already investing heavily in the development of LAWS attended the five-day meeting in Geneva, blocking a majority from agreeing on steps to establish legally-binding rules on machine-operated weapons.

Sources following the talks told Reuters news agency that Russia, India and the United States were among the countries that pushed back against a new LAWS treaty….

Uncle Sugar has been playing this dog-in-the-manger act over and over for decades. We did it with nuclear weapons and here we go, again. Other – equally untrustworthy – nations will match or surpass “our” killer robots with their own killer robots. Then, we sign off and say “OK” hoping at a minimum to keep some of the smaller power brokers from creating their own lot of murderous toys.