Should We Ban Killer Robots?

131 Pages·2022·2.044 MB·English

by  Deane Baker

Should We Ban
Killer Robots?
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Deane Baker
Should We Ban
Killer Robots?
polity
Copyright © Deane Baker 2022
The right of Deane Baker to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4850-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4851-4 (pb)
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Of War Dogs, Bat Bombs, Mercenaries
and Killer Robots 12
2 Trust, Trustworthiness and Reliability 33
3 Control and Accountability 54
4 Motives and Dignity 85
Conclusion: So Then, Should We Ban Killer
Robots? 110
References 116
v
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to trial
earlier versions of several of the arguments in
this book in other forums. Parts of what follows
first appeared in ‘Autonomous Weapons and the
Epistemology of Targeting’, in the Defence- in- Depth
blog (10 September 2018), ‘The Awkwardness of
the Dignity Objection to Autonomous Weapons’,
in the Strategy Bridge journal (6 December 2018)
and ‘The Robot Dogs of War’, in Jai Galliott,
Duncan MacIntosh and David Ohlin (eds), Lethal
Autonomous Weapons: Re-examining the Law
and Ethics of Robotic Warfare (Oxford University
Press 2021). I have also drawn on arguments that
appeared in my books Just Warriors, Inc.: The
Ethics of Privatised Force (Continuum 2010) and
Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral
Risk (Bloomsbury Academic 2016). Along the
Acknowledgements
way I have received insightful inputs from friends,
students and colleagues, including Liran Antebi,
Ned Dobos, Erin Hahn, Mark Hilborne, David
Kilcullen, Peter Lee, Rain Liivoja, Ian MacLeod,
Rob McLaughlin, Valerie Morkevicius, David
Pfotenhauer, Shashank Reddy, Julian Tattersall and
Mathew Wann (among others). I am particularly
grateful for comments on the final draft by the two
anonymous readers and for the guidance of George
Owers and the team at Polity.
This book is dedicated to my daughters, the fabu-
lous Baker girls: Jemimah, Kezi and Amelia.
vii