A/HRC/23/47 robots are especially effective at dealing with quantitative issues, they have limited abilities to make the qualitative assessments that are often called for when dealing with human life. Machine calculations are rendered difficult by some of the contradictions often underlying battlefield choices. A further concern relates to the ability of robots to distinguish legal from illegal orders. 56. While LARs may thus in some ways be able to make certain assessments more accurately and faster than humans, they are in other ways more limited, often because they have restricted abilities to interpret context and to make value-based calculations. B. LARs and the decision to go to war or otherwise use force 57. During the larger part of the last two centuries, international law was developed to constrain armed conflict and the use of force during law enforcement operations, to make it an option of last resort. However, there are also built-in constraints that humans have against going to war or otherwise using force which continue to play an important (if often not decisive) role in safeguarding lives and international security. Chief among these are unique human traits such as our aversion to getting killed, losing loved ones, or having to kill other people.29 The physical and psychological distance from the actual use of force potentially introduced by LARs can lessen all three concerns and even render them unnoticeable to those on the side of the State deploying LARs. 30 Military commanders for example may therefore more readily deploy LARs than real human soldiers. 58. This ease could potentially affect political decisions. Due to the low or lowered human costs of armed conflict to States with LARs in their arsenals, the national public may over time become increasingly disengaged and leave the decision to use force as a largely financial or diplomatic question for the State, leading to the “normalization” of armed conflict.31 LARs may thus lower the threshold for States for going to war or otherwise using lethal force, resulting in armed conflict no longer being a measure of last resort32 According to the report of the Secretary-General on the role of science and technology in the context of international security and disarmament, “…the increased capability of autonomous vehicles opens up the potential for acts of warfare to be conducted by nations without the constraint of their people‟s response to loss of human life.”33 Presenting the use of unmanned systems as a less costly alternative to deploying “boots on the ground” may thus in many cases be a false dichotomy. If there is not sufficient support for a ground invasion, the true alternative to using unmanned systems may be not to use force at all. 59. Some have argued that if the above reasoning is taken to its logical conclusion, States should not attempt to develop any military technology that reduces the brutality of armed conflict or lowers overall deaths through greater accuracy.34 Drones and highaltitude airstrikes using smart bombs should then equally be viewed as problematic because 29 30 31 32 33 34 A/65/321, para. 44; John Mueller “The Iraq Syndrome”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 6, p. 44 (November/December 2005). According to military experts, it generally becomes easier to take life as the distance between the actor and the target increases. See David Grossman On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 1996). Armin Krishnan Killer robots: Legality and Ethicality of Autonomous Weapons (Ashgate, 2009) p. 150 Singer (see note 3 above), p. 323; Peter Asaro “How Just Could a Robot War Be?” in P. Brey et al (eds.) Current Issues in Computing And Philosophy (2008), p. 7. A/53/202, para. 98. Asaro (see note 32 above), pp. 7-9. Discussed by Patrick Lin et al “Robots in War: Issues of Risk and Ethics” in R. Capurro & M. Nagenborg (eds.) Ethics and Robotics (2009) p. 57. 11