San Francisco Startup Pitches Trump Admin on Arming Robots for U.S. Military
A San Francisco-based robotics company says the Trump administration has expressed interest in deploying its high-tech robots onto future battlefields reports Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban from NBC Bay Area.
“I think when we get to arming robots, we get into a much more complex moral area,” said David DeCosse, director, religious and Catholic ethics, who has been researching the ethics of war for the past 30 years.
“Who is responsible for making decisions in which human life is involved?” said DeCosse, who warned that delegating life-and-death decisions to machines risks blurring accountability in combat. “If it's a robot, even a programmed robot, I think that responsibility gets diminished in a problematic way.”
“We have gotten as far as we have in this country by being smart about our defense and also being moral about it,” DeCosse said. “A race to the bottom with these things is not a race that I think as Americans we want to pursue.”
David DeCosse, director, religious and Catholic ethics, quoted by NBC Bay Area.