Opinion | Should We Let Robots Kill People?

What’s your understanding of the constraints on what the Pentagon allows a drone or an autonomous weapon to do without a human deciding: Kill this person; shoot this person? So if you look at the actual policy, the more important thing is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you’re not allowed to automate the kill chain. It doesn’t say that you’re not allowed to build a military system that is capable of basically being a lethal, autonomous weapon. So you’re allowed to do that? You are not not allowed to do that. I think what the point is that people also have to appreciate that bureaucracies by nature, and military bureaucracies in particular, are inherently conservative. And I think that it’s a fundamental misunderstanding. And I’m not saying that you’re guilty of this, but I think that many are. It is a misunderstanding. I could be guilty of it. That’s OK. – It’s a misunderstanding of our defense institution that they’re just going to take a bunch of unproven technology and then willy-nilly kind of throw it onto the battlefield and see what happens. You don’t want a weapon system that malfunctions. You don’t want a drone or an autonomous system that hallucinates. So there is a process that all new technology has to go through. And in the process of that training and testing, you’re going to build trust that those systems are safe to use and effective to use. And where in that process do you determine where the moral line is for letting robots kill people? So to take a specific point of differentiation, how I would answer your question would be very different in a defensive application of this technology than an offensive application. If I’m going to take a highly intelligent machine and send it downrange to go hunt targets and basically make its own decisions about what to do, what to shoot, et cetera, there’s going to be a far higher bar applied to letting that system go off and do those things than a similar system would be if it were employed in a defensive setting. So you’re going to be far more willing to put that kind of advanced technology into a defensive use case, because you are literally protecting human life, as opposed to an offensive case where you’re sending that system out to take human life.