Thank you for this contribution and for all the work that this article required.
I will try to go in order through the arguments that I find most interesting to further discuss.
A) Responsibility:
What is the evidence that human societies are capable of holding responsible generals and technology producers for death caused by a certain technology?
If I think about the poor record the International Criminal Court has of bringing war criminals to justice, and the fact that the use of cluster bombs in Laos or Agent Orange in Vietnam did not lead to major trials, I am skeptical on whether someone would be hold accountable for crimes committed by LAWs.
2. What evidence do we have that international lawmaking follows suit when a lethal technology is developed as the writer assumes it will happen?
From Wikipedia on Arms Control: “According to a 2020 study in the American Political Science Review, arms control is rare because successful arms control agreements involve a difficult trade-off between transparency and security. For arms control agreements to be effective, there needs to be a way to thoroughly verify that a state is following the agreement, such as through intrusive inspections. However, states are often reluctant to submit to such inspections when they have reasons to fear that the inspectors will use the inspections to gather information about the capabilities of the state, which could be used in a future conflict.”
B) Moral Hazard:
The article does a good work in looking at the evidence available for ratio military/civilian casualties in war.
However, in order for the comparison to make more sense I would argue that the different examples should be weighted according to the number of victims.
Intuitively to me, the case for LAWs increasing the chance of overseas conflicts such as the Iraq invasion is a very relevant one, because of the magnitude of civilian deaths.
From what the text says I do not see why the conclusion is that banning LAWs would have a neutral effect on the likelihood of overseas wars, given that the texts admits that it is an actual concern.
I think the considerations about counterinsurgencies operations being positive for the population is at the very least biased towards favoring Western intervention.
One could say that if a state like Iraq was not destabilized in the first place, it would not be ground for the expansion of groups such as ISIL.
Twenty years and 38,000 civilian deaths after the beginning of the Afghanistan War, the Talibans still control half of the country.
C) Domestic conflict
I think this section makes lots of assumptions and this stresses the high level of uncertainty we have about this topic, I will just quote some of the passages that are open to debate:
“Their new military capability likely won’t change much, as rebels could obtain their own AI and rebels have usually taken asymmetric approaches with political and tactical exploits to circumvent their dearth of heavy organized combat power.”
“If autocrats make errant over-use of LAWs to protect their regimes, as many states have done with regular mechanized forces, they could inadvertently weaken themselves. Otherwise, smart states will seek to avoid being forced to deploy LAWs against their own people.”
“Future technologies may increase popular power even further.” → the rise of social media and conspirationism does not necessarily constitute an increase in popular power.
D) Effects of campaigning against killer robots
The considerations about China and the world order in this section seem simplistic and rely on many assumptions.
Hello. Could you explain a bit more what you mean?
Intuitively I imagine journalism is becoming less influential as people are increasingly trapped in echo chambers and their ability to process complex information and think critically is reducing.
What do you make of the arguments in Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’ Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government?
Namely that voters are driven by group identity and tend to evaluate political leaders and parties based on recent events or outcomes in their lives—especially economic conditions or crises—after they’ve happened, rather than making decisions based on informed policy preferences or long-term considerations.
If that’s the case, investigative journalism may have a smaller than expected impact.