The world didn’t wait for weapons manufacturers to self-regulate warfare. It built a treaty. We need the same architecture here.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Part 4 of 4: The Framework We Have to Build

In 1864, twelve nations gathered in Geneva and signed an agreement that had never existed before in human history.

They weren’t naive. They weren’t under the illusion that war would stop or that the agreement would be universally honored. They were practical people who had watched the industrialization of warfare produce suffering on a scale that previous generations hadn’t imagined, and who understood that the tools of war had outpaced the moral frameworks governing their use. They decided that some lines had to be drawn before the next conflict, not after. That certain protections had to be established in advance, not negotiated in the wreckage of their violation.

The Geneva Conventions didn’t eliminate war. They didn’t eliminate atrocity. What they did was create a shared framework that established, at the level of international agreement, what was and wasn’t acceptable — and gave that framework enough institutional weight that violations became matters of global consequence rather than local discretion.

We need the same architecture for robots.

Not a government regulation from a single country that other countries will ignore. Not a corporate ethics board that reports to executives whose bonuses depend on shipping product. Not a voluntary industry pledge that means whatever the signatories need it to mean when a lucrative contract appears. A multinational framework with genuine teeth, built before the incidents that make it urgent, that separates the robots designed to care for human life from the machines designed to threaten it.

And in 2026, this conversation can no longer stop at humanoid robots. Because the challenge has already expanded well beyond bipedal machines. It includes quadruped dog-bots that can be weaponized with an attachment that takes minutes to install. It includes autonomous drones that can identify and engage targets without a human in the decision loop. It includes warehouse automation systems that share core AI architectures with military targeting platforms. The physical form is irrelevant. The question is what values are encoded in the behavior, and whether those values are verifiable and binding.

What the Framework Has to Separate

Before you can build the treaty, you have to name what it’s separating.

The fundamental distinction is not between “good robots” and “bad robots,” or between civilian and military applications in the simple sense. Military robotics has legitimate uses — logistics, reconnaissance, bomb disposal, search and rescue in contested environments — that don’t require the ability to harm. The distinction is more precise than military versus civilian.

It is the distinction between machines designed with harm avoidance as a foundational constraint, and machines designed without it.

A care robot, properly designed, has harm avoidance baked into its architecture at the level of its physical parameters, its decision logic, and its override systems. It cannot apply more force than a human hand. It cannot move faster than a human caregiver. It cannot make irreversible decisions without human confirmation. These are not software preferences that can be updated away. They are structural commitments.

A combat-capable robot, properly designed, has harm avoidance removed from its architecture in specific, intentional ways. It can apply lethal force. It can act at machine speed in situations where human speed would be insufficient. It can, in its most autonomous configurations, make engagement decisions without human confirmation.

These are not two points on a continuum. They are opposite design philosophies. And a framework that enforces the separation has to operate at the level of design and architecture, not just intent and use.

The same applies to drones. A last-mile delivery drone and an autonomous combat drone share propulsion systems, navigation technology, and computer vision. But their design architectures differ in exactly the way described above. A delivery drone is physically incapable of the kind of harm an armed drone is capable of — not because of a software setting, but because of what it is built to do and built with. That architectural difference is what the framework has to preserve and certify.

The same applies to quadruped dog-bots. Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 platform and Boston Dynamics’ Spot are, at the mechanical level, similar designs. They become categorically different depending on whether they are equipped with a sensor payload for environmental monitoring or a weapons attachment for force projection. The hardware modification is trivial. The ethical difference is not. A framework that allows the same platform to be sold into both markets without structural separation is a framework that solves nothing.

“Do no harm” must be engineered—force limits, autonomy boundaries, and strict separation. Without enforceable design rules, care robots remain trust claims, not trusted systems.

What “Do No Harm” Actually Means in Machine Behavior

The Geneva Conventions had to grapple with translating moral principles into operational rules. What does “protecting civilians” actually mean when armies are moving through villages? What counts as a “medical facility” that cannot be targeted? The work of the Conventions was largely the work of making abstractions specific enough to be enforceable.

A framework for robots faces the same challenge. “Do no harm” sounds simple. Encoded in machine behavior, it is extraordinarily complex.

It means defining maximum force parameters — physical limits on what a care-category robot can do to a human body, verified through certification testing, not just manufacturer assertion. A robot that can apply enough force to break a bone is not a care robot, regardless of what its marketing says. A robot that can move fast enough to injure a person who stumbles into its path is not a care robot. These are measurable properties. They can be tested and certified.

It means defining autonomy ceilings — limits on what decisions a care-category robot can make without human confirmation. A care robot should not be able to administer medication, apply physical restraint, or make any decision with irreversible consequences for a human without a human in the loop. These are architectural constraints, not software policies.

It means defining deployment separation — a requirement that platforms certified as care robots not be capable of weapons integration without physical modification that would be detectable and would void the certification. This is the equivalent of dual-use export controls, applied at the product design level. A platform that can accept a weapons attachment with a fifteen-minute modification is not, in any meaningful sense, a care robot. It is a care robot waiting to become something else.

It means defining data separation — prohibitions on sharing behavioral data, operational logs, or training datasets between care-category and combat-capable systems. The AI architectures underlying care robots and combat robots should not be the same architecture trained on different data. They should be developed under different principles, with different safety validation requirements, and the data that shapes their behavior should not flow between them.

None of these definitions are easy. All of them will require serious technical, legal, and ethical work. But the work is doable, and it needs to start before the incidents that make it urgent rather than after.

Robotics needs a neutral convening force—like a Geneva moment—to set enforceable norms. Without it, trust remains undefined and accountability optional.

Who Convenes This

The Geneva Conventions were convened by Switzerland, a neutral nation with both the credibility and the motivation to serve as a honest broker. The initial signatories were twelve European nations. The framework grew over subsequent decades through additional conventions and protocols.

A robotics framework needs a similar convening structure. It needs a party with enough credibility to gather stakeholders who don’t fully trust each other, enough neutrality to be seen as an honest broker, and enough institutional weight to give the resulting agreement meaning.

Several candidates are plausible. The International Committee of the Red Cross has already begun engaging seriously with the questions of autonomous weapons and humanitarian law. The IEEE — the world’s largest professional organization for engineers — has an existing ethics framework for autonomous systems and the technical credibility to define what architectural separation actually requires. The United Nations has existing structures for arms control that could be extended to autonomous systems. A coalition of smaller nations with no major military robotics programs have both the motivation and the credibility to initiate the process without being perceived as acting in their own military interest.

What’s needed is not consensus from the start. The Geneva Conventions didn’t require universal agreement to be meaningful. They required enough signatories with enough credibility that the framework established a norm — a shared understanding of what the world considered acceptable — and that violations carried real reputational and diplomatic costs even for non-signatories.

The same architecture applies here. A framework signed by a meaningful coalition of nations and major robotics manufacturers — one that establishes clear certification categories, verifiable architectural standards, and real consequences for misrepresentation — creates a norm even if not every actor honors it. It establishes what the civilized world considers acceptable. It gives consumers, regulators, and investors a reference point that currently doesn’t exist.

What the Industry Has to Decide

The robotics industry is at a decision point that it is not yet facing directly.

The companies building care robots have a profound commercial interest in the existence of a framework like this — not because they want to be regulated, but because the alternative is an incident that destroys the trust the entire care market depends on, and no individual company has the power to prevent that incident from happening. The framework is in their interest. The separation is in their interest. The certification is in their interest, because certification creates a signal they can use to earn the trust they need.

The companies building military and dual-use platforms have a different calculus. The framework asks them to accept limits on their product’s applicability, to invest in architectural separation that costs money, and to give up the option of selling the same platform into both markets without restriction. That is a real cost, and they will resist it.

But they should consider what the alternative looks like. Absent a framework, the incident described in the previous column is not a possibility — it is a certainty. And when it happens, the regulatory response will not be thoughtful, technically informed, or proportionate. It will be reactive, politically driven, and likely to harm the legitimate applications of robotic technology far more than a proactive framework would.

Reactive regulation is almost always worse than proactive frameworks. The pharmaceutical industry learned this. The aviation industry learned this. The nuclear industry learned this. The robotics industry has the opportunity to learn it before the lesson is imposed, but the window for choosing to learn it is not unlimited.

With real standards, robots earn trust—not just function. Separate care from combat, certify behavior, and the future becomes safe enough to fully embrace.

What Gets Built in the World Where This Works

I want to end this series not with the problem but with the possibility.

A world in which a genuine Geneva Convention for robots exists — in which care robots are architecturally separated from combat systems, certified to verifiable standards, and governed by a multinational framework with real teeth — is a world in which the full promise of care robotics can actually be realized.

In that world, the elderly woman living alone can have a robot companion that her family trusts, because the trust is not based on marketing claims but on verified architectural commitments and independent certification. The sleep-deprived parent can accept help from a machine at 2 in the morning because the framework that governs that machine’s behavior is the same framework that governs the behavior of every certified care robot on Earth — not the preference of the company that built it, revisable in the next software update.

In that world, the drone that delivers your package and the drone that monitors your elderly parent’s wandering behavior in a memory care facility are verifiably, architecturally different from the drone that can be equipped for combat — and that difference is enforced by a framework with enough weight to mean something.

In that world, the quadruped robot that inspects your home’s foundation for damage is not, in any sense that matters, the same machine as the weaponized dog-bot in military footage. The difference is not just in what they’re used for. It’s in what they’re built to be.

Isaac Asimov saw the need for this in 1942 and tried to articulate it in fiction because the serious conversation wasn’t happening anywhere else. He imagined three simple laws, and then spent the rest of his career showing why simple laws weren’t enough — why the real work was in the details, the edge cases, the places where principles meet complexity.

We are living in the moment he was writing toward. The robots are real. The stakes are real. The absence of a framework is real.

The Geneva Conventions were born in the recognition that some things are too important to be left to individual actors to decide on their own, in their own interest, without accountability to anything larger than themselves.

Robots that live with our families and robots that can harm human beings are too important for that.

The world built a treaty before. It can build one again. The question is whether the robotics industry, and the governments that have the power to convene this conversation, will choose to build it before the incidents that make it unavoidable — or after.

History suggests we usually wait for the incidents.

This series has been an argument for not waiting.

Related Reading

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Autonomous Weapons

International Committee of the Red Cross — The ICRC’s formal position on autonomous weapons systems and the application of international humanitarian law — the most credible existing foundation for the kind of framework this column proposes

IEEE Ethically Aligned Design: A Framework for Autonomous Systems

IEEE — The most technically rigorous existing framework for encoding ethical principles in autonomous system design — the engineering foundation on which architectural certification standards could be built

Lessons from Arms Control: What Robotics Governance Can Learn from Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons Treaties

RAND Corporation — A comparative analysis of how previous dual-use technology governance frameworks were built, what made them work, and what the robotics industry can learn from the history of international agreements that managed dangerous technologies before catastrophe forced the issue

The post A Geneva Convention for Robots appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

Trust in robots will not be built incrementally. But it can be destroyed in a single afternoon.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Part 3 of 4: The Military Paradox Nobody Will Discuss

Let me describe two robots.

The first is designed for eldercare. It moves slowly and deliberately through a home, helps a 78-year-old woman with limited mobility get from her bed to her chair, reminds her to take her medication, detects if she falls, and calls for help if she does. It is gentle by design. Its physical parameters are constrained specifically to prevent it from applying more force than a human hand would use. Its entire architecture is built around one principle: do not harm the person in your care.

The second is designed for military reconnaissance and force projection. It can move fast across difficult terrain, carry significant payload, identify targets using computer vision, and in its more advanced configurations, make or assist with engagement decisions in contested environments. It is capable by design. Its physical parameters are optimized for effectiveness in situations where the humans nearby may be adversaries. Its architecture is built around a completely different principle: accomplish the mission.

Both of these robots exist right now. Both are being actively developed and in some cases deployed. Both use similar foundational technologies — the same locomotion research, the same computer vision systems, the same advances in battery technology and actuator design that have driven the whole field forward.

And both are being developed, in many cases, by the same companies. Or by companies that share investors, share talent, share research lineages, and operate in the same public conversation about the future of robotics.

That is the military paradox. And the robotics industry is not discussing it honestly.

The Funding Reality

To understand why this matters, you need to understand where robotics development money actually comes from.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been one of the most important funders of fundamental robotics research for decades. DARPA’s robotics challenges in the 2010s produced technology that directly seeded the current generation of humanoid platforms. Boston Dynamics — whose Atlas robot is the most recognizable humanoid in the world — spent years under the ownership of Google before being sold to Hyundai, but its foundational development included significant defense-adjacent funding and the Atlas platform has been demonstrated in countless military-adjacent contexts.

The US Army has active programs evaluating robotic platforms for logistics, reconnaissance, and combat support. The Defense Department’s vision of the future battlefield includes robotic systems operating alongside human soldiers. The investment flowing into defense robotics is enormous and accelerating, and it is not cleanly separated from the investment flowing into consumer and care robotics. The research is connected. The talent moves between sectors. The companies that win defense contracts build capabilities that transfer.

None of this is secret. It is all documented in public filings, press releases, and conference presentations. What is not being said publicly — at least not in the consumer-facing conversations about the wonderful future of robot caregivers and domestic helpers — is what the convergence of these two development tracks means for the trust that the entire industry depends on.

What Footage Does

Trust is not a technical property. It cannot be engineered into a product the way you engineer payload capacity or battery life. It is a social property — something that exists in the relationship between a technology and the public that encounters it. And it is profoundly asymmetric in how it is built and destroyed.

Building trust in a technology takes years. It requires consistent, reliable, incident-free performance across millions of interactions, in environments that matter to real people, witnessed by enough people that the positive evidence accumulates in public consciousness. It requires the absence of dramatic failures. It requires time.

Destroying trust in a technology can take minutes. It requires one incident, clearly documented, that is frightening enough to crystallize the fears that were always present but suppressed by the weight of positive experience.

Aviation spent decades building the trust that makes billions of people comfortable getting on commercial aircraft. A single high-profile crash, handled badly, can create a confidence crisis that grounds fleets and reshapes industry dynamics for years. The trust is real and hard-won. The vulnerability is permanent.

The robotics industry has not spent decades building public trust. It is in the early stages of that process. The positive experiences are limited to relatively small populations of early adopters, researchers, and industrial users. The general public’s relationship with humanoid robots is still primarily mediated by science fiction, product demonstrations, and news coverage — all of which create impressions, but none of which create the deep experiential trust that comes from living with a technology over time.

Now consider what happens when footage appears — and it will appear, because it always does — of a military robot causing harm. Not a weapon failing to discriminate properly in a war zone thousands of miles away. Something closer. Something that looks, to a person watching it on a phone screen, like the same kind of robot that companies have been telling us will help with our elderly parents and our young children.

The human brain is not equipped to parse the difference between a Boston Dynamics robot deployed in an eldercare demonstration and a Boston Dynamics robot deployed in a military context. It sees the machine. It sees what the machine did. It draws the conclusion that machines of that type do that kind of thing.

That is not irrational. That is how trust works.

Mixing military and care robots blurs trust. If the same technology serves harm and help, the public won’t separate them—and trust collapses.

The Branding Problem That Isn’t Being Named

Several robotics companies are actively pursuing both markets simultaneously — or selling the same underlying platform into both tracks. Figure AI, founded in 2022 and now one of the most heavily funded humanoid robotics companies in the world, has announced partnerships with both BMW for manufacturing and the US military. Sanctuary AI is working on general-purpose robots for commercial environments. Ghost Robotics — which makes quadruped robots physically similar to Boston Dynamics’ Spot — has supplied platforms to the US Air Force and been photographed with weapons attachments. The images went viral. The consumer robotics industry noticed and said almost nothing publicly.

The challenge for the industry is structural, not incidental. Military robotics and care robotics are not merely different products. They are, in the deepest sense, antithetical products. One is optimized for keeping humans safe through force limitation and harm avoidance. The other is optimized for operational effectiveness in environments where harm is the context. The values embedded in these two design tracks are not merely different — they are opposed.

When the same corporate family, or the same underlying technology, is visible in both tracks, the public’s ability to maintain the distinction breaks down. And the public’s ability to maintain that distinction is the entire foundation on which the care robotics market is built.

A parent deciding whether to trust a robot with their child is not running a technical analysis of that specific robot’s safety architecture. They are asking a simpler, more human question: do robots in general feel safe? Is this a technology that is fundamentally oriented toward human wellbeing, or is it a technology that is fundamentally a tool of power, and the care applications are just one version of that tool?

Right now, the honest answer to that question is: we’re not sure. And “we’re not sure” is not a foundation for the kind of trust that care robotics requires.

The Incident That Changes Everything

I want to be specific about the scenario I am describing, because vagueness lets the industry dismiss this concern as speculative.

The scenario is not a hypothetical future event. It is a near-certainty given current trajectories. Here is the shape of it.

A military or law enforcement robot — a real, deployed system, not a prototype — is involved in an incident that causes civilian harm. Or a weapons-equipped quadruped robot appears in footage from a conflict zone operating in a way that the watching public finds disturbing. Or a security robot in a domestic context behaves in a way that is aggressive enough to generate viral footage. Or a military demo video is released that shows a humanoid robot performing actions that, out of context, look alarming.

The footage spreads. Because footage always spreads. The coverage does not carefully distinguish between military and care applications, between quadrupeds and humanoids, between combat robots and eldercare robots. It covers robots. The public discussion does not carefully distinguish either. The comment sections do not distinguish. The legislation that follows does not distinguish.

And the care robotics companies that have spent years building toward the moment when ordinary families trust these machines in their homes will find that the floor has dropped out from under their market. Not because their product failed. Because a different product, built on the same general technology, failed in a way that was visible, frightening, and impossible to contextualize away.

The trust destruction will be rapid. The trust rebuilding will take years. And the people who will suffer most from that lost decade are not the investors. They are the elderly people who needed a robot helper and couldn’t get one because the public turned against the category. The families who could have been supported and weren’t. The caregivers who could have been helped and weren’t.

Care and combat robots and drones can’t blur together. Without clear separation, one incident could collapse trust across the entire industry—before safeguards exist.

What the Industry Is Choosing Not to Do

The solution is not for robotics companies to stop taking defense contracts. The defense dollars are real, the applications are legitimate in their own context, and unilateral disarmament in the face of competitive pressure is not a realistic ask.

The solution is structural separation — a clear, public, verifiable commitment to maintaining the difference between care robots and combat robots at the level of design, deployment, branding, and governance. Not a press release. Not a corporate ethics policy that can be quietly revised when a lucrative contract appears. An architecture that makes the distinction real, visible, and durable.

That architecture does not currently exist. The industry has not built it because building it would require acknowledging the problem, and acknowledging the problem would require saying publicly what most people in the industry know privately: that the military and care robotics tracks are in fundamental tension with each other, that the tension is a threat to the care robotics market’s long-term viability, and that nobody has figured out how to resolve it.

The companies in this space are one incident away from a crisis they are not prepared for. The incident will not be something they caused. It will be something that happened somewhere else, in a different context, with a different product. But it will look enough like their product, on a small screen, viewed by a frightened public that doesn’t know the difference between what was built for a battlefield and what was built for a nursery.

That day is coming. The framework to survive it doesn’t exist yet.

Next: A Geneva Convention for Robots — The world didn’t wait for weapons manufacturers to self-regulate warfare. It built a treaty. What would a binding international framework for robot ethics actually look like — who convenes it, who signs it, and what does “do no harm” mean when encoded in machine behavior?

Related Reading

The Pentagon’s Push for Autonomous Weapons — and What It Means for Everyone Else

RAND Corporation — A rigorous analysis of the current state of military robotics development, the pace of autonomy in defense systems, and the governance questions that dual-use technology raises for both military and civilian applications

When Robots Go to War: The Public Trust Implications of Military Robotics

IEEE Spectrum — How the public perception of military robotic platforms shapes attitudes toward consumer and care robotics — and why the industry’s silence on this connection is a structural vulnerability

The Dual-Use Dilemma: How Defense Funding Shapes Civilian Technology — and Its Risks

Brookings Institution — The history and current dynamics of defense-funded research flowing into civilian applications, the governance frameworks that have and haven’t worked, and what the robotics industry can learn from previous dual-use technology crises

The post One Incident Away appeared first on Futurist Speaker.