Rory Stewart

And again, this all seems crazy, but it's crazy because the technology is moving so quickly.

Won't be that crazy.

You could just have fully autonomous weapons, where we have a choice there.

Yeah, so we know drones, you might have seen them kind of flying around.

Autonomous would mean that rather than having a human controller guiding its every movement,

you could give it some very open-ended goal, or perhaps a whole fleet of drones.

You give a very open-ended goal.

Destroy London?

Destroy London, yeah.

Or just, we're at war with China.

We want to win.

And then it will just figure out the strategy and implement that.

Think of a wholly autonomous self-driving car.

One where you just say, look, I want to get to Oxford.

And then it'll just, it'll figure out the best path and drive you there.

We're not that far away from that technology being feasible.

But now think how power changes in that world, where at the moment, if a general says, I think I'd like power over the country to myself, and orders his soldiers to storm the Capitol building, the soldiers will say no.

It is an open question how we choose to govern and design autonomous weapons, where one way could be that these are just tools.

A hammer does not resist you if you try and hit someone on the head with it.

Similarly, AI is a tool that should do as instructed.