Unmanned equipment has become the main direction of future development, and the proportion of unmanned weapons in the future army has further increased has become a general consensus. However, so far, all unmanned equipment combat still relies on operators to control, and no equipment can independently carry out lethal combat on its own, in other words, any strike operation needs to be remotely operated by human operators, and the machine cannot fight on its own, after all, this design is complex battlefield judgment, artificial intelligence technology has not yet developed to that stage, and there are still many controversies about the corresponding moral and legal issues. But just before people are ready to lead to robot wars, the day of machine killing has arrived.
According to the Global Times quoted russian satellite network news on June 1, according to a foreign media investigation, in march 2020 on the Libyan battlefield, there was the first machine in human history to be equipped with an autonomous hunting target - a Kak-2 UAV produced by turkey's STM company searched for and killed a soldier of the Libyan National Army in an autonomous mode. The U.N. Security Council Panel of Experts on Libya said the Kagu-2 quadcopter unmanned attack aircraft was programmed to attack targets without operator control, when the drone accurately tracked and attacked the retreating Libyan National Army, a true "no-go-ahead."
Drone equipment to kill targets is commonplace today, but this incident in the Libyan war is essentially different from all known drone combat, that is, drone equipment chooses the target and launches the attack without the remote control of the personnel operator. Technically, this is not difficult to achieve, only the corresponding programming work can be implemented, the machine is nothing more than the execution of a command. It is reported that the Kagu-2 UAV has a facial recognition function, which is likely to be the root cause of its attack without relying on the operator. However, this kind of attack is actually quite immature, because face recognition technology is far from providing a reliable basis for attack, how to distinguish between the target is a soldier or a civilian, how to distinguish the target's enemy or self belonging, and the collateral impact of the surrounding after the attack, which is a very complex problem, and the machine program does not have this capability at present. And the ability of drones to make face recognition of targets now seems to have not reached the point where they can be used in actual combat, and it is very likely that this is just a gimmick given by a Turkish company.
In fact, Turkey's most likely approach is to drop drones into the combat area where enemy troops are concentrated, and the pattern is probably to kill the moving personnel, and this rough setting directly bypasses the problem of how to specifically determine the target. In other words, it's not hard to do this kind of killing, just set up a program for the machine to fire at all moving humanoid targets. Obviously, this is bound to bring serious additional damage, and I am afraid that the enemy and I are not separated, and it is impossible to enter the battlefield at present, and Turkey's approach is simple and crude, and at the same time lacks respect for legal principles.
The comment of Russian experts on this incident is that the Turkish military industry has opened Pandora's box, and the incident of unmanned equipment without operators to kill and injure humans autonomously appeared for the first time, which is real machine killing, not human remote control machine killing, which is crucial. There is a strong controversy in all walks of life about the legal and moral issues of robot killing, and the author has no intention of discussing this complex issue, but perhaps we can only accept the fact that due to military needs, the era of autonomous killing and even autonomous combat by drones will come sooner or later, which is probably difficult to reverse. There is a saying that although it is very extreme, it is still very foreseeable, that is, human beings create technology, and technology destroys human beings.