Robot Warfare

Not the Future We Want

“A Ukrainian drone maker said fully autonomous drones killed Russian soldiers in a frontline test — the first known machine kills in combat with no human in the loop.“

“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

Without venturing into sci-fi plots like Terminator, humanity should give serious consideration to the implication of a machine, making independent decisions, killing a human.

I’m quite “pro-robot”. I think they will be fun (but expensive) toys. Of course robots have been boosting industrial production for a long time now, but humanoid, general purpose robots will be something of a new thing in two to three years. They will even be helpful around the house. Imagine having a robot to hold things while you work on something. Or instead of having crappy, unreliable Google Home playing whole home music for you, perhaps a robot would come with a good sound system and follow you around playing your favorite music?

What is the point to war?

Take a moment to ponder that, get past the knee jerk reactions of war being necessary to defend against evil tyrants. This train of though rapidly leads to “he said, she said” blame as to who “started it”. I’m firmly of the opinion that you can not trust the media to give you an accurate picture of why a war actually started.

Is war for population control? Hopefully anyone with the slightest bit of a moral compass would agree that war is not an acceptable way to keep population from growing too rapidly.

To resolve conflict between nations, that isn’t able to be settled with negotiations, our modern world has developed economic warfare. Certainly a more civilized approach than murdering each other. Robot combat might be an escalation of economic warfare that drags humanity back into violence.

My concern is that if we don’t object to military usage of robots, we will soon find our world has become a tyranny of whomever (nation or corporation) is most technologically advanced. This is closely related to saying whomever is wealthiest enough to afford the best robots.

But isn’t this better than humans killing other humans? I don’t think so. Erasing the moral implications of murder from warfare encourages and legitimizes more warfare.

How do we stop the development of killer robots? First, the employees of any company doing such work should refuse to work on these projects. If that doesn’t work, we need society wide opposition to these companies to shut them down.

But won’t our enemies just develop something and we will be defenseless? Perhaps. Perhaps we could develop these robots but have a strict and 100% enforced ban on deploying them unless our nation is actually invaded. (defensive usage only)

For further reading on this topic, see my previous article from April 28, 2026: Killer Robots