Comment by Robert O. Work

“Here is one of the problems with the Campaign To Stop Killer Robots,” said former deputy defense secretary Robert Work. “They refer to ‘lethal autonomous weapons systems.’ […] They’re defining a weapon that is unsupervised or independent from human direction, unsupervised in its battlefield operations, and self-targeting [i.e. chooses its own targets],” Work said. “The weapon doesn’t exist! It might not even be technically feasible, and if it is technically feasible, there’s absolutely no evidence that a western army, certainly the United States, would employ such a weapon.” “In the meantime,” Work went on angrily, “they’re willing to say, ‘I’m willing to sacrifice the lives of American servicemen and women, I’m willing to take more civilian casualties, and I’m willing to take more collateral damage, on the off chance that sometime in the future this weapon will exist. “That’s unethical to me,” Work said. “That’s terribly unethical. In fact, I think it’s immoral.”