Droid-on-droid mayhem OK'd.

A new set of laws has been proposed to govern operations by killer robots as Asimov's Laws of Robotics are too restrictive. The ideas were floated by John S Canning, an engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre, USA. "Let machines target other machines," he writes, "and let men target men."

Canning proposes that robot warriors should be allowed to mix it up among themselves freely, autonomously deciding to blast enemy weapon systems. Many enemy "systems" would, of course, be themselves robots, so it's clear that machine-on-machine violence isn't a problem. The difficulty comes when the automatic battlers need to target humans. In such cases Mr Canning says that permission from a human operator should be sought.

The concept document makes the point that various kinds of automated death-tech have been allowed to destroy machinery or even people for years.

Which seems to suggest that a robot could decide, under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear. Effectively the robot is allowed to disarm enemies by prying their guns from their cold dead hands.

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