An article of mine was recently published at The Federalist, readers. I thought you might like to give it a look:
Using Drones To Kill Lets Military Commanders Bypass Soldiers Who Might Resist
Perfect soldiers are predictable, unquestioningly obedient, and silent unless spoken to first. Good men, on the other hand, are entirely irregular.
OCTOBER 1, 2021
Turkey trotted out its military drones last week at Istanbul’s Teknofest, one of the world’s largest technology festivals. The country’s drone force made controversial headlines when a United Nations report in March found that a Turkish Kargu-2 drone had hunted down and killed an enemy combatant without any specific instructions in March 2020.
The machine was “operating in a ‘highly effective’ autonomous mode,” The New York Post reported. This allowed it to strike without direct oversight. The machine followed its programming without any express input from a human monitor.
Meanwhile, researchers are developing robots that can accurately mimic a human being’s movements. YouTube videos of the bi-pedal Atlas robots from Boston Dynamics – a design company related to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology– show the robots performing parkour-like maneuvers and picking up boxes, with the scientists occasionally shoving them over and pulling the box away. Atlas will then go back to pick up the box with single-minded determination.
Any concerns about Atlas going rogue may be theoretical, but the Turkish drone story spotlights a real-life hazard. A machine – no matter how sophisticated – that is programmed to destroy will hold fast to its mission. It has no understanding of or concern for morality; life means nothing to it.
All that matters to a robot is following its programmed course the developers prepared to fill its function. The recent drone strike launched by the Biden administration that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, serves as the most recent example of a drone’s inability to distinguish a mission gone wrong.