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In the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, new, autonomous weapons are being used. Our Inside Geneva podcast asks whether we’re losing the race to control them – and the artificial intelligence systems that run them.

“Autonomous weapons systems raise significant moral, ethical, and legal problems challenging human control over the use of force and handing over life-and-death decision-making to machines,” says Sai Bourothu, specialist in automated decision research with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

How can we be sure an autonomous weapon will do what we humans originally intended? Who’s in control?

Jean-Marc Rickli from the Geneva Centre for Security Policy adds: “AI and machine learning basically lead to a situation where the machine is able to learn. And so now, if you talk to specialists, to scientists, they will tell you that it's a black box, we don't understand, it's very difficult to backtrack.”

Our listeners asked if an autonomous weapon could show empathy? Could it differentiate between a fighter and a child? Last year, an experiment asked patients to rate chatbot doctors versus human doctors.

“Medical chatbots ranked much better in the quality. But they also asked them to rank empathy. And on the empathy dimension they also ranked better. If that is the case, then you opened up a Pandora’s box that will be completely transformative for disinformation,” explains Rickli.

Are we going to lose our humanity because we think machines are not only more reliable, but also kinder?

“I think it's going to be an incredibly immense task to code something such as empathy. I think almost as close to the question of whether machines can love,” says Bourothu.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast to learn more about this topic.

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The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it.

“We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Charles Petrie, former United Nations (UN) humanitarian coordinator, recalls: “She thought there was a good chance that the Interahamwe [militia] would find the kids, the children, and she said, ‘pray that they don’t hack them to death, pray that they shoot them’”.

Why was it not prevented?

“The paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players to respond to what was pretty clearly a massive genocidal operation,” says Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister.

Senior diplomats worked to make the UN stronger in the face of atrocities.

“Instead of talking about the right to intervene, we talked about the responsibility to protect. There are some kinds of behaviour which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response,” says Evans.

Has “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, worked?

“I don’t think there’s been significant progress. I would say actually that we went from perhaps a hope, an illusion that something would be done to actually not expecting anything at all now,” says Stokes.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast.

Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.

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• Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch
• Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en

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In Inside Geneva this week we get an eyewitness account of a mission to supply Gaza’s hospitals.

Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘People have told me oh you must be very brave for going to Gaza. I don’t think so, I think what’s brave is the people who have been doing this work since early October, and who go back every day, to do it again and again and again.’

Aid agencies say nowhere is safe in Gaza

Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘A woman with her young child saying to me, are we safe here? And I wanted to say to her ‘You’re in the grounds a hospital, this is a protected space, you should be safe here’. But I couldn’t say to her ‘you’re safe here.’’

And we hear from human rights defenders who have come to Geneva, hoping for support.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, human rights defender, Belarus: ‘I really believe that the democratic, powerful world will its teeth and will show to dictators that they will not prevail. We are not asking you to fight instead of us, we are asking you to help us fight the dictators.’

Are democracies letting human rights defenders in autocratic states down?

Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production Assistant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang

Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.

Get in touch!

• Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch
• Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en

Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.