Sounds like confirmation bias. If an algorithm had made the right call against human judgment, would you be arguing for the opposite position?
A human can currently do a much better job when the outcome is that millions of people die , especially if its a sensor error. That's not to say that humans are infallible, just that we do not currently have the level of AI required to replace one.
Both are bad, but people playing the game at all, were the real problem.
With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed
to let American officers use their nuclear
weapons, in an emergency, if there were no
time or no means to contact the President.
Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their
nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down
Soviet bombers heading toward the United
States. And about half a dozen high-level
American commanders were allowed to use far
more powerful nuclear weapons, without
contacting the White House first, when
their forces were under attack and “the
urgency of time and circumstances clearly
does not permit a specific decision by the
President, or other person empowered to act
in his stead.”
Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a
top official at the Department of Defense
had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to
every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific
Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles.
At the Pentagon, the book was taken
seriously as a cautionary tale about what
might go wrong.
A decade after the release of “Strangelove,”
the Soviet Union began work on the
Perimeter system - a network of sensors and
computers that could allow junior military
officials to launch missiles without
oversight from the Soviet leadership.
Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the
film. Completed in 1985, the system was
known as the Dead Hand. Once it was
activated, Perimeter would order the launch
of long-range missiles at the United States
if it detected nuclear detonations on
Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be
reached.
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
> Accounts differ as to the degree of automation of Dead Hand... more recent sources indicate the system was semi-automatic. In a 2007 article, Ron Rosenbaum quotes Blair as saying that Dead Hand is "designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike." Rosenbaum writes, "Of course, there's a world of difference between a 'semi-automatic' doomsday device and the totally automatic—beyond human control—doomsday device."