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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really clear on what the moral difference is between an artillery shell, a criuse missile, a drone strike, and an autonomous robot that targets the wrong individual. As far as human agency is concerned, all three are weapons of war that kill indiscriminantly. How is the autonomous system worse? Is it the illusion that we might be able to delegate moral agency to the machine?

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If you're going for logical consistency, when it comes to rules of war, you end up with no rules.

Why is a nuclear bomb different to a full scale carpet bombing campaign. Why is mustard gas different to a fragment grenade? Why is killing ok, but torture is not? Why is a barely discriminate bombing campaign legal but a subway bombing illegal?

Rules of war always encountered these arguments. But, do we want to eliminate them, just so things are philosophically consistent?

Makes me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

Imagine an AI in such a scenario. Count me as one of those people who thinks we are headed into a kind of hell.

I think this comes down to my last sentence -- delegating the decision to kill to a robot is not really different from deciding to kill. But we may do it anyway, and wash our hands. I suppose this is the source of the unease about autonomous drones. Not that they're worse than other killing machines, but that we might deceive ourselves into thinking that they're better.

Maybe a better analogy than a cruise missile would be a land mine. A device that kills, possibly much later than when it's deployed, and often an unintended target.

You could argue that an autonomous robot may be morally better in that it could be more discriminating as to whom to attack than say artillery shells.

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