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Should We Ban Killer Robots?
Deane Baker
polity
Copyright © Deane Baker 2022
The right of Deane Baker to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4852-1
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to trial earlier versions of several of the arguments in this book in other forums. Parts of what follows first appeared in ‘Autonomous Weapons and the Epistemology of Targeting’, in the Defence-in-Depth blog (10 September 2018), ‘The Awkwardness of the Dignity Objection to Autonomous Weapons’, in the Strategy Bridge journal (6 December 2018) and ‘The Robot Dogs of War’, in Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh and David Ohlin (eds), Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Re-examining the Law and Ethics of Robotic Warfare (Oxford University Press 2021). I have also drawn on arguments that appeared in my books Just Warriors, Inc.: The Ethics of Privatised Force (Continuum 2010) and Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk (Bloomsbury Academic 2016). Along the way I have received insightful inputs from friends, students and colleagues, including Liran Antebi, Ned Dobos, Erin Hahn, Mark Hilborne, David Kilcullen, Peter Lee, Rain Liivoja, Ian MacLeod, Rob McLaughlin, Valerie Morkevicius, David Pfotenhauer, Shashank Reddy, Julian Tattersall and Mathew Wann (among others). I am particularly grateful for comments on the final draft by the two anonymous readers and for the guidance of George Owers and the team at Polity.
This book is dedicated to my daughters, the fabulous Baker girls: Jemimah, Kezi and Amelia.
Introduction
If you haven’t yet watched the short film Slaughterbots on YouTube, you really should do so now. I mean it – stop reading immediately and watch the video before going any further. You won’t regret it, Slaughterbots is short and impressively well executed. Besides, what I say below contains spoilers.
Slaughterbots was created by the Future of Life Institute in conjunction with Stuart Russell from the University of California at Berkeley. The film garnered over 350,000 views on YouTube in the first four days after its release, and was reported on by a large range of news outlets, from CNN to the Telegraph. The fictional near-future scenario depicted in this film in vivid Hollywood thriller style is both entertaining and scary, but is scripted with serious intent. As Russell explains at the end of
