As head of computer science at RPI, James Handler knows more about robotics and artificial intelligence than most people. So when he says the time is now for a ban on so-called "killer robots" -— machines with weaponry and decision-making power to kill, without human oversight -— it's reasonable to listen.

Last week, Hendler was among nearly 300 scientists from three dozen countries who signed a statement to the United Nations calling for governments to stop such robotic technology, which has long been the stuff of dystopian science fiction and films as far back as the 1927 silent German classic "Metropolis."

While the public might envision something along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the "Terminator" movies, the military term for such weapons is "lethally autonomous robots," or LARS, meaning the machine's artificial intelligence would select and destroy targets, human or otherwise. The lethal machine could be a flying drone, tank, vessel, vehicle or fixed weapon that could sense its surroundings and fire based on its findings.

"The first generation of such machines are already being tested by some countries," said Hendler, a 56-year-old expert in robotics and artificial intelligence and former scientific adviser to the Air Force who joined RPI in 2006. In Troy, his research involves something called the semantic web, an extension of the World Wide Web to enable computers to interpret the meaning and context of words and numbers.

More Information

More information

See the petition to the U.N. signed by James Hendler of RPI and other scientists at Learn about laws controlling robot behavior that were deemed critical by the late science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov at

This year, he was named director of the RPI Institute for Data Exploration and Applications, a $60 million project to explore applications of so-called "Big Data," based on increasingly powerful computing, artificial intelligence and device networking over an expanding Internet.

During the 1990s, when Hendler headed a robotics lab at the University of Maryland, the idea of "weaponizing" robots, which were still relatively clumsy devices, was still theoretical. Now, he said, the technology, particularly the sciences of target recognition and cognitive computing, has caught up. In cognitive computing, systems are trained using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to sense, predict, infer and, in some ways, think, according to experts.

"For the time being, such robots are still expensive, hard to build and owned by very few," Hendler said. "But we are at a cusp in time when that won't be the case. And it will be very hard to put these things back in the box."

This week, at the U.N., diplomats from Egypt, France and Switzerland proposed regulating "killer robots" while the technology is still developing, becoming some of the first international voices to back calls that groups like Human Rights Watch and Campaign to Stop Killer Robots began raising last year.

The idea that man-made machines, once capable of independent action, could turn on their creator has long haunted science-fiction writers. So troubling was this scenario that prominent writer Isaac Asimov, when he began writing about robots in the 1940s, made his first law of robotics this: A robot must not harm a human, or cause a human to come to harm through its inaction. In his second law, robots had to obey humans unless obeying violated this directive.

Hendler said he is less worried about legions of lethal robots turning against humankind in general, than he is about such killing machines being used by criminal gangs, terrorist groups, military strongmen or dictatorships. For example, during the 2011 civilian uprising in Egypt, the army refused orders from the government to suppress protesters. But if the government had squads of lethal robots to deploy, a massacre could have ensued as machines blindly followed commands without the moral choice faced by human soldiers.

"We are not facing Terminators yet," Hendler said. "But some of these technologies are very close and within a decade will be there. Most of the science fiction about use of robots contained these ethical dimensions. But when you look at the military arenas where developments are taking place, you are not seeing these ethical issues being raised."

Hendler said he "wanted to see these discussions taking place now, while these things are just starting to come out. We need to have roboticists, ethicists and government officials talking about this now."