News Analysis On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opened a conference in Geneva by calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs). “I encourage the Review Conference to agree on an ambitious plan for the future to establish restrictions on the use of certain types of autonomous weapons,” said the Secretary-General at the opening of Monday’s meeting. In recent years, with new advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, there have been growing concerns about LAWs, which use programmed instructions to seek out and incapacitate targets, potentially without the oversight of a human controller. The meeting in Geneva was occasioned by a recent U.N. report’s conclusion that fully autonomous weapons may have debuted in Libya in March 2020, during a skirmish in which Turkish-produced autonomous drones were used to hunt fleeing partisans of Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. “Logistics convoys and retreating HAF [Haftar Affiliated Forces] were subsequently hunted down and …