Should Autonomous Weapons Systems Be Permitted?

• Human soldiers are subject to fear, anger, exhaustion, and hatred that degrades their capacity for discrimination — autonomous systems operating by precise rules of engagement could be more compliant with international humanitarian law than the humans they replace.
• Autonomous systems are already deployed in missile defense, electronic warfare, and drone swarms; the question is not whether to allow machine decision-making in warfare but where to draw the line — a blanket prohibition ignores the spectrum that already exists.
• The arms race is happening regardless of whether the US and Europe participate; unilateral disarmament from autonomous weapons development hands the advantage to China and Russia, who will not observe a treaty they aren't party to.

Debater: To be announced

• The laws of war require human judgment — proportionality, distinction between combatants and civilians, the ability to accept surrender — that no current AI system can reliably exercise; autonomous weapons will commit war crimes, and there will be no human to hold accountable.
• The barrier to mass atrocity is partly the human cost to the perpetrator; autonomous weapons eliminate that friction entirely, making genocide, ethnic cleansing, and political assassination dramatically cheaper and easier to deploy against unarmed populations.
• An autonomous weapons race produces the worst possible equilibrium: fast-decision cycles where systems respond to each other faster than humans can intervene, creating escalation dynamics toward catastrophic conflict that no one intended and no one can stop.

Debater: To be announced