Abstract

Is it justified at all that a machine kills people, or takes decisions about life and death? Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh argues in his guest article for uni:view why the use of fully autonomous weapons is ethically highly problematic.Weapon systems become more and more autonomous. This means that they can take decisions without human intervention. Sometimes human operators can still override the decision or are still "in the loop": they are still involved in the decision. But as the technology advances, we get systems that in principle do not need the human. Do we want this? Do we want to allow this?