What? No. The fact that she's ex-military and runs a drone company is precisely why she should be on such a board.

If there is no one on the board with the relevant knowledge and experience to competently represent a given use case, then the board will likely be unable to produce results relevant to such use cases. For example, if I form a board to hash out software version control system best practices but actively exclude experts on distributed VCS such as git and mercurial, then the resulting "best practices" are unlikely to prove useful for anyone actually using a DVCS in reality.

My point here is that excluding her almost certainly won't actually do anything to prevent the development of militarized AI. Rather, it will simply reduce the likelihood that anything the board puts out has influence on such matters.

So, the idea of "discussing it" is to first exclude everybody who might hold an opinion different from the one you want to arrive at (preferably without even actually asking them - why bother to ask a person if she's for or against military drones if she served in the military so you already know everything about her views from one single factoid?). At which point I'm not sure why indeed waste time on having any council at all - a dozen people that think all the same can be replaced by just one person at 12x more efficiency.

Granted, but there's much more than a binary (use/ban) discussion to be had here. It's important that we have open discourse about the design, manufacture, deployment, and general use of such things in order to avoid dangerous or highly objectionable outcomes.

There is more than one way to do something; the repercussions of those pathways may differ significantly.

Probably not. That would be equivalent to including someone who claims "radiation from computers interferes with your brain" on this AI panel, or perhaps someone who claims "krakens pose an immediate danger to inattentive sailors" on a maritime safety council.

Most people can tell the difference between someone you don't agree with for ideological reasons and someone you don't agree with because they ignore facts for attention. I'm assuming the poster was referring to the former. There's a big difference between say, having a Republican on the committee vs a Holocaust denier. While it requires a certain amount of empathy to realize that rational people can have the same inputs as you but produce different opinions, I think it's a beneficial thing to recognize.