What do you think of robots in the military?

Very little about war is ethical. Sometimes people refer to it as a “moral solvent” because things that are absolutely unethical in peacetime sometimes become necessary to avoid defeat. This can justify all sorts of horrible things in self-defense. Killing enemy soldiers is only the beginning.

In Ukraine, there is a drone arms race. I believe that usually they kill people by remote control, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they started killing people automatically.

And there will be more robots:

Robot wars: Ukraine now adding ‘land drones’ to its futuristic arsenal

Now, a similar process is unfolding involving robots – or “land drones,” as Ukrainians prefer to call them. Unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, are being developed and deployed on the front lines to carry out tasks traditionally handled by foot soldiers.

From providing reconnaissance and delivering supplies to firing small arms, evacuating the wounded, and mining and demining, robots are doing it, or soon will be.

Speaking to weapons manufacturers on Ukraine’s Arms Makers’ Day in April, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine, for the first time, had captured an unspecified Russian position “using exclusively unmanned platforms,” both aerial drones and robots. “The future is here, on the battlefield,” he said, “and Ukraine is creating it.”

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Currently, about 90% of the tasks robots are undertaking in the war are in logistics, though the use of UGVs for reconnaissance missions that might stump UAVs – for example, in areas of heavy tree cover – is growing rapidly.

As a trend, this is scary as hell. What happens in Ukraine won’t stay in Ukraine. But who am I to say that the Ukrainians are wrong to defend themselves this way?

It doesn’t seem likely that there will be international agreements about a new kind of war crime concerning robots.

And certainly, there will be no complaints about robots taking soldiers’ jobs. The more soldiers they can replace, the better.