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Comment by QuercusMax | Hacker News Reader

I mean, you have people who design weapons. They're explicitly intended to kill people. Is programing a robot to kill people any different from programming a weapon targeting system?

I'm not endorsing this, mind you, but it's not really any different that what we've been doing to each other for millenia.

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But the responsibility of “pulling the trigger” makes these engineers sheltered from any guilt. However, engineering the cases for triggering the robots to kill and the resulting bugs can be directly attributed to the team that designs it. Whether they care or not, or ever have a hard time falling asleep at night is a different story..

There are plenty of engineers who build systems where bugs can lead directly to death.

In the case of killer robots, the engineers are not (outside of a test gone wrong) going to be realeasing the robots themselves. They are going to be giving them to the military, where officers create and load particular configurations then release the robots with that. These are the same people who current create orders release frontline soldiers to execute said orders.

That's my point. There's been a steady trend toward global annihilation and as a species we are running toward it.

I was out with a bunch of friends who worked for Northrup Grumman and I was like, "Why do you guys work there building things designed to kill people?"

Synchronized response: The money is good.

>Synchronized response: The money is good.

It has to be because many people wouldn't work there.

I wonder if OP meant “deciding whether or not to kill people”.

Yes, thank you, I did. To clarify, the debate was about allowing robots to kill without a human in the loop.

Basically, drop the robots in and let them start killing by whatever algorithm has been programmed into them.

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