A two-day international conference on autonomous weapons systems is to begin in Vienna on Monday. The Foreign Ministry issued invitations to the conference, entitled “Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation,” after expert negotiations under UN auspices in Geneva over the past 10 years failed to lead to talks at the diplomatic level. Around 130 countries, along with the UN, non-governmental organizations and research institutes, are expected to attend. Weapons systems that independently select and strike targets using artificial intelligence (AI) a…