Good overview of the technical trajectory. One dimension I think deserves more attention is the political economy of war rather than just the mechanics. The piece rightly notes that robotic systems could save lives by keeping humans out of the line of fire, but that same dynamic cuts the other way.
Democratic accountability over the use of force has historically relied on a brutal feedback mechanism: body bags come home, voters get angry, wars become politically unsustainable. Remove that, and you don't just change how wars are fought, you change when and how often they start.
The real risk of autonomous military systems isn't that they become uncontrollable on the battlefield. It's that they make war cheap enough (politically) that the threshold for using force drops dramatically. Wasted defense spending generates op-eds; flag-draped coffins end presidencies. A leader who can project force without risking real domestic opposition faces a fundamentally different political calculus, and history suggests that calculus will resolve toward more frequent use of force, not less.
So the question isn't just whether a human stays in the kill chain for ethical or legal reasons, it's whether keeping humans at risk in warfare is, perversely, one of the strongest constraints we have on the decision to go to war in the first place.
I enjoyed reading the article. But I have some doubts on the legal feasibility of removing the kill-chain. I think it might be interesting to reduce it or make it faster, but a human will always be the responsible of any autonomous decision https://jeibros.substack.com/p/why-fully-autonomous-weapons-cannot
This is a very real concern, but I could imagine a world where it's a human's *legal* responsibility, in that they launched the autonomous agent, while the agent is still making the kill decisions. In fact I think this is very likely, and it's somewhat possible this is already happening.
Good overview of the technical trajectory. One dimension I think deserves more attention is the political economy of war rather than just the mechanics. The piece rightly notes that robotic systems could save lives by keeping humans out of the line of fire, but that same dynamic cuts the other way.
Democratic accountability over the use of force has historically relied on a brutal feedback mechanism: body bags come home, voters get angry, wars become politically unsustainable. Remove that, and you don't just change how wars are fought, you change when and how often they start.
The real risk of autonomous military systems isn't that they become uncontrollable on the battlefield. It's that they make war cheap enough (politically) that the threshold for using force drops dramatically. Wasted defense spending generates op-eds; flag-draped coffins end presidencies. A leader who can project force without risking real domestic opposition faces a fundamentally different political calculus, and history suggests that calculus will resolve toward more frequent use of force, not less.
So the question isn't just whether a human stays in the kill chain for ethical or legal reasons, it's whether keeping humans at risk in warfare is, perversely, one of the strongest constraints we have on the decision to go to war in the first place.
And I've yet to see anyone mention how this will spread down from military to law enforcement. Because it will.
law enforcement already uses robots fairly heavily, at least when there's a shooter
another option: mass surveillance on a scale you've never imagined possible
No, you miss my point. Bots are indeed frequently used https://standardbots.com/blog/police-robot. However, “The absence of regulation has negative ramifications for those on all sides of the debate.” https://www.policingproject.org/police-robots-force.
My point is militarization of law enforcement is a thing https://fee.org/articles/new-study-militarizing-the-police-doesn-t-reduce-crime/, as I’ve mentioned in my last piece. Thus it’s easy to see bots used in military killchains making their way to LEOs.
As far as what surveillance I can imagine, you’re selling me short. Your assertion here is baffling.
I enjoyed reading the article. But I have some doubts on the legal feasibility of removing the kill-chain. I think it might be interesting to reduce it or make it faster, but a human will always be the responsible of any autonomous decision https://jeibros.substack.com/p/why-fully-autonomous-weapons-cannot
This is a very real concern, but I could imagine a world where it's a human's *legal* responsibility, in that they launched the autonomous agent, while the agent is still making the kill decisions. In fact I think this is very likely, and it's somewhat possible this is already happening.