Should we ban fully autonomous weapons?

Author(s)

Mark Coeckelbergh

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?

Organisation(s)

Department of Philosophy

Journal

uni:view

Publication date

01-2018

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

603122 Philosophy of technology, 603103 Ethics, 203036 Weapons and munitions technology

Keywords

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/ee67dd52-f85a-4e73-b058-91d7d1e4e415