Should a robot decide when to kill?

[Darren]

taking a life should NEVER be left to robots.

Don't we already have automation by design? Even when human beings are involved. We have trust misplaced on poor intelligence often going unquestioned. The atrocities we do know of come from leaks from whistle blowers supposedly damaging 'national security'. It's clear who is doing that.

For the people who pull the triggers the intelligence automates the process. When you remove barriers to action it becomes easier to take. When the action is killing people where does the line get drawn. When does it prove too much?

The government does not appear to apply the same standard of care in selecting whom to target for assassination. The former JSOC drone operator estimates that the overwhelming majority of high-value target operations he worked on in Afghanistan relied on signals intelligence, known as SIGINT, based on the NSA’s phone-tracking technology.

“Everything they turned into a kinetic strike or a night raid was almost 90 percent that,” he says. “You could tell, because you’d go back to the mission reports and it will say ‘this mission was triggered by SIGINT,’ which means it was triggered by a geolocation cell.”

There are spokespeople in the US who have advocated the exact same stance and action should apply to US citizens on home soil deemed a threat. Reports are fed through to personel and there is implicit trust upon these reports to verify an individual by nothing more than a phone SIM. Essentially you're reaching a stage where you have automation by proxy. You may have a human being pulling the trigger behind a screen in a remote cabin. But the basis on which it's done is wholly unreliable, detatched and devoid of human process and verification. There aren't eyes on the ground, these people aren't visually identifiable via the drone feed. You have blind trust upon mass data gathering despite clear gaps in logic when attempting to prove verification.