[cogman10]

Mainly I don't want them because I don't want a machine instantly making life or death judgements. It might be fine if it mostly informs a human who ultimately pulls the trigger, but having that failsafe is important in keeping machines from going on killing sprees.

I also want people to be held accountable when they do unjustified killings. AI weapons make it FAR too easy to simply pass off a killing as a "woopsie doodle." It's just not acceptable to say "The algorithm made a mistake, version 23 will do better".

I don't have a problem with the AI providing additional information to it's user, but when that's incorporated into a weapon it's a short distance from that to completely automating the killing.

That's why I'm completely against AI weapons.

[metalsiliconYT]

Responsibility will always have to lie with the user, but if the weapons are more advanced and safer then why is that bad? I like that autonomous vehicles like Waymo are 10x safer then human drivers, even if a 'Machine' is making decisions.

[scarecrowbob]

Because they aren't "safer" for the folks getting killed.

Historically, the folks doing the murdering just don't care about the folks they kill, so "safer for the killers" isn't a win for most of us.

"More precision" isn't about killing less folks, it's about making it safer and easier for folks who kill folks to do that work.

So those of us who dislike killing don't like these tools because we consider them to be immoral.

[butlike]

That is a great point and one I never considered. The folks doing the murdering shouldn't have their jobs be easier. They aren't safer for the person getting killed.

[cogman10]

> Responsibility will always have to lie with the user

Being fully autonomous makes it hard to identify exactly who that user is and is easy to dilute responsibility. Perhaps someone was added to a kill list by mistake. Maybe some internet hi-jinks tricked an AI into falsely identifying someone as a kill target. Perhaps it's the case that someone was in the 5% of a 95% confidence of identification. I'm not a fan of putting killing into the hands of something known to get things wrong 1 in 20 (95%), or 1 in 100 (99%), or 1 in 1000 (99.9%).

> but if the weapons are more advanced and safer then why is that bad?

It's yet to be proven that they are "safer" as they become more advanced. There's also a question of "safer to who". It's technically "safer" for a soldier to shoot first and ask questions later, it's obviously not safer for the villagers.

False identification, which is an absolute part of AI, doesn't make these weapons safer for anyone.

> I like that autonomous vehicles like Waymo are 10x safer then human drivers, even if a 'Machine' is making decisions.

Waymo has the reverse bias. If anyone dies as a result of waymo it's gone horribly wrong.

AI weapons are designed exactly to kill, if they don't kill when they should something has gone wrong.

[anon-3988]

A good thought experiment for this is to replace guards at jewellery stores or banks with a robot. Which one would you feel more safe? Do you trust that the robot won't randomly shoot you if you act funny on the street?