ABSTRACT
The previous chapter showed that the idea, and in fact use, of machines for fighting and killing humans is very old. The automated killing machine of the land mine appeared in sixteenth-century Europe and has proved to be one of the most murderous inventions of mankind (Youngblood 2006, 6). Mines, though still causing a massive toll in human life (on average 24,000 a year), seem to somehow be different in nature from the ‘killer robot’ – an intelligent machine that does not simply sit and wait for a human to trigger it, but that can go out and actively search for human prey. What makes the killer robot so much scarier than mine warfare is its intelligence and perceived (or real) ability to make decisions over life and death. In other words, the killer robot does not simply kill (like a mine) – it can make the decision to kill (or not to kill), which elevates it ontologically and maybe even morally from the mere object to a subject capable of morally meaningful action. What is scary about the killer robot is not the fact that it would be more dangerous than mines, but rather its ability to make life and death decisions in place of a human. The concept of the lethal autonomous military robot is in some sense just the latest expression of a broader and quite disturbing trend in warfare, which is the general decline of human decision-making (Adams 2001).
