Can autonomous AI-powered killer drones take morality onboard?

S hould the AI-powered drones of the future have a licence to kill? The question is becoming ever more pressing as governments and the defence industry acknowledge that drone systems will play an increasingly crucial role in future warfare. With drones being deployed in huge numbers in the Ukraine war and AI being used to assist bombing missions in the Iran conflict, there is an expectation among some observers that weapons will have to operate with increased operational autonomy, which means they will need something approximating a moral framework. Last year Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft’s AI arm and a co-founder of the UK-based DeepMind, was unequivocal about the issue of machines making moral decisions. He said: “AIs cannot be people – or moral beings.” David Omand, the former head of the UK spy agency, GCHQ, has told the Guardian he believes AI can create a “moral” configuration for unmanned weapons, while the UK armed forces minister, Al Carns, told the Financial Times recently there must be an option to “take the human out of the loop” in decision-making . This brings into focus the ethical and technological challenge of whether morality can be programmed into an autonomous weapons system. …