Killer Autonomous Weapons in Africa: Media Delay and Degeneracy

Last March we reported the use of Turkish killer drones in autonomous mode in Libya. This information was initially noticed on March 17 by Laurent Lagneau in a UN report on the ineffectiveness of the arms embargo imposed on Libya. This report dated March 8 was announced by the UN on March 17.

Except Laurent Lagneau in France and lenouveaureporter in Togo, journalists, even the specialised ones, either missed this information or felt that it was not worth an article. And suddenly since May 30 a few dozen articles devoted to this information have been published in the francophone1 or English-speaking media2 . It's two and a half months later.

This cluster of publications follows an article by Zachary Kallenborn on May 20 on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, then an article by David Hambling on May 27 on the NewScientist site. David Hambling had already published an article in September 2019 on the use of Turkish killer autonomous drones in Syria. Regarding the francophone media, it should be noted that the first two sites to have mentioned this information are Sputnik France and Russia Today France. For their part, the French media began to cover this information from the next day at best. And major media like RFI or Le Monde have not yet reacted.

In the English-speaking media, after the articles by Kallenborn and Hambling, the New York Post and Fox News reported this information, followed in particular by The Independent, Popular Mechanics and NPR, but most of the major US media did not react.

The lack of media coverage of such a major event for two and a half months was shocking: the first use of a weapon in autonomous mode, i.e. in a mode where an artificial intelligence can decide to kill without any human intervention, is a fact constituting the beginning of a sea change in the way men kill each other.

From a cindynical point of view, in our post of March 19, we gave the example of a perception disparity between the CCAC French experts  for whom lethal autonomous weapons systems do not exist, and the UN report experts who mention the use of such lethal autonomous weapons systems in Libya.

The media coverage more than two months late illustrates two other cindynical notions: information gaps, and degeneracies. The lack of media coverage for two and a half months stems from a lack of information on the part of journalists, who did not know how, or could not, or did not want to find the information. And this information gap in turn causes a generalised information gap since people are not informed: the consequence is an absence of political mobilisation, therefore a lack of political decisions that should enable to proscribe the development and proliferation of a plainly dystopian technology.

Another cindynical notion: degeneracy, i.e. the absence of priorities. The glaring illustration is given by the headline selections that Google makes on its news pages: how is it possible to justify that an information as important as the use of autonomous killer drones in Africa is not referenced on Google news, and that on the other hand articles devoted to petty events are referenced on this home page? While there has been a lot of criticism of Russian media in recent times, it should be honestly noted that Google has the overwhelming power to decide what humans need to know about, on a planetary scale. Coincidence or not: some time ago, Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, provided Joe Biden with a report in favor of lethal autonomous weapons.

These media coverage problems illustrate the importance of cindynamics and the role of information flows in cindynogenesis i.e. in the fabrication of danger. We can thus think of the role of the media in the UN's inaction during the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994, or in the delay of the WHO's reaction during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Among others.

Beyond the position taken by Emmanuel Macron, who initially spoke out against this technology, the media coverage of this issue could lead to practical initiatives at the international level, which should enable a political mobilisation against the development of killer robots which António Guterres has already denounced as"politically unacceptable" and "morally repugnant"