Can AI Weapons Make Ethical Decisions?

The ability of machines to make truly independent and autonomous decisions is a goal of many, not least of military leaders who wish to take the human out of the loop as much as possible, claiming that autonomous military weaponry—most notably drones—can make decisions more quickly and with greater accuracy. However, there is no clear understanding of how autonomous weapons should be conceptualized and of the implications that their “autonomous” nature has on them as ethical agents. It will be argued that autonomous weapons are not full ethical agents due to the restrictions of their coding. However, the highly complex machine-learning nature gives the impression that they are making their own decisions and creates the illusion that their human operators are protected from the responsibility of the harm they cause. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between autonomous AI weapons and an AI with autonomy, a distinction that creates two different ethical problems for their use. For autonomous weapons, their limited agency combined with machine-learning means their human counterparts are still responsible for their actions while having no ability to control or intercede in the actual decisions made. If, on the other hand, an AI could reach the point of autonomy, the level of critical reflection would make its decisions unpredictable and dangerous in a weapon.