Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk.
Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fired if an LLM hallucinates and kills people? Perhaps Anthropic's stance is to avoid liability if that were to happen.
It's sort of like the opposite of this idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fisher_(academic)#Preven...
> Fisher [...] suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes in a volunteer. If the President of the United States wanted to activate nuclear weapons, he would be required to kill the volunteer to retrieve the codes.
>> [...] The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. [...]
>> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981[10]
There should be two knives so the volunteer can defend themselves if they don't think starting a war is worth it.
That's so idealistic. We should know by now the reality of power and what kind of people end up in power. Anyone who could climb all the way to the top would kill the volunteer without a second thought, and then go smile on TV.
You're confusing lazy cynicism with realism. Patrick Bateman is a fictional character. The vast, vast majority of people, including even most soldiers, and definitely pretty much all businesspeople, no matter how unscrupulous, do not have the capacity to violently murder a person they know and harbor no ill will towards with their own hands on short notice.
maybe they should make the person with the codes black. I think several cold-war presidents probably wouldn't have a problem with that
The whole damn point behind the idea is to achieve the exact opposite. Make it someone, through whatever criteria, whom the president will have a problem killing, so he'll only do it under the most extreme circumstances.
The danger is that we won't be sending these fully-autonomous drones to 'war', but anytime a person in power feels like assassinating a leader or taking out a dissident, without having to make a big deal out of it. The reality is that AI will be used, not merely as a weapon, but as an accountability sink.
Pretty soon we'll have depositions where the bots explain they thought they saw a weapon and were in fear for their lives.
Counsel: "How do you explain the nanny cam footage of you planting a weapon?"
Robot: "I have encountered an exception and must power off. Shutting down."
> 'war'
> anytime a person in power feels like assassinating a leader or taking out a dissident
I don't really see much of a difference nowadays
This is exactly how all other weapons of mass destruction were rationalised.
"If we develop <terrible weapon> we can save so many lives of our soldiers". It always ends up being used to murder civilians.
Literally the justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Do you think a continuation of the firebombing campaign and an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in fewer deaths of civilians (particularly of the 'volunteer fighting corps')?
That's to say nothing of the deaths in a potential US/USSR conflict that goes hot without the Damocles Sword of MAD...
This is a false dichotomy. In the words of the post-war US strategic bombing survey:
"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
While this is all speculation, that was at the very least a defensible point of view held by a bunch of Americans shortly after the war.
Regarding firebombing: Hiroshima alone killed probably more civilians than the entire Tokyo firebombing campaign. A firestorm is a terrible thing, but you can still run from a fire even if your whole city burns down; you can't run from a nuke.
So if you measure collateral damage primarily in civilian deaths, firebombing still looks much better (a hypothetical firebombing campaign would have probably killed <40k civilians in Hiroshima instead of 100k, guesstimating from Tokyo numbers).
Edit: I don't think dropping the nuclear bombs was especially ethically questionable compared to the rest of the war, but I feel it is very important to not whitewash that event as valiant effort to save young American conscripts. Regarding it as a slightly selfish weapon demonstration feels much more accurate to me.
Did Americans know or believe that the Japanese were planning to surrender when the bombs were dropped, or only after the fact? That’s important because the Japanese didn’t even entertain the idea of surrender in July (Potsdam Declaration).
Because the Japanese were still fighting, the wartime economy was still trying to produce what it could, and the Japanese government was arming and instructing its civilians for fighting.
Post-surrender, it’s easy to say “we were planning to surrender”, especially to save face and pass the buck to the Americans for what the Japanese government brought on their people by continuing to prosecute the war effort.
I don't think regarding it as a "demonstration" is accurate either.
Nuclear bombs appear as uniquely horrifying and requiring special justification only in hindsight. Back then, it was just another type of bomb. The thought process behind dropping it was simply "let's hit them as hard as we can until they surrender".
> Nuclear bombs appear as uniquely horrifying and requiring special justification only in hindsight. Back then, it was just another type of bomb.
I disagree slightly with that take. Decisionmakers knew that those singular bombs were gonna glass an entire city each, and previously almost untouched targets were selected to better show and observe the effect.
If you're at a point where you can afford to slash the primary target (Kyoto) because of nostalgic value to your secretary of war then it becomes difficult to rationalize the whole thing as "normal genuine war effort" and makes the thing look somewhat of an optional choice.
But from my point of view much more questionable decisions were made than the atomic bombings, and hindsight is always 20/20.
> previously almost untouched targets were selected to better show and observe the effect.
I read that this was not the primary motivation; rather, those cities were basically on the top of the "list of industrial centers we didn't get around to bombing conventionally yet, but were going to do next".
"Back then, it was just another type of bomb."
To some of the military leaders, sure. To the scientists and politicians, it wasn't viewed through such a simplistic lens.
> Do you think a continuation of the firebombing campaign and an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in fewer deaths of civilians (particularly of the 'volunteer fighting corps')?
I don't know, but there's a lot of evidence this wasn't a factor in the decision to drop the bombs on Japan. The planners for the invasion and the planners for the bombing weren't exactly talking to each other and coordinating the strategy.
They had the bomb and they were going to use it. Everything else was an a posteriori justification.
Now think what will happen with easily deployed AI-powered weapons.
> the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk.
Not so clear cut. Because now sending people to die in distant wars is likely to get a negative reaction at home, this creates some sort of impediment for waging war. Sometimes not enough, but it's not nothing. Sending your boys to die for fuck knows what.
If you're just sending AI powered drones, it reduces the threshold for war tremendously, which in my mind is not "the moral choice".
All of this assuming AI is as good as humans.
Isn't this the moral hazard of war as it becomes more of a distance sport? That powerful governments can order the razing of cities and assassinate leaders with ease?
We need to do it because our enemies are doing it, in any case.
I do not think that anyone but the US and Israel have assassinated leaders in the last 30 years. I also question their autonomous drone advancement. Russia and China did not have the means to help Venezuela and they do not have the means to help Iran.
Russia and other states have demonstrably conducted targeted killings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_and_gov...
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>"Russia and China did not have the means to help Venezuela"
Of course they have the means. Nothing technical prohibits them from blowing couple of carriers. But the price they would have to pay is way too high.
Did you mean Venezuela or Iran?
Because there are actual technical impediments why neither China nor the Russians could have blown a US carrier in the Caribbean.
>"actual technical impediments"
I do not believe so. Not unsurmountable at least. The consequences are however far from pleasant for each side
I do believe there are major technical impediments; other than a modern attack sub reaching that far undetected I can't think of how they would do it. The US is the only nation that can effectively project power so far away from its borders, almost anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, you mentioned this in response to "helping Venezuela", but even damaging a carrier (something technically very, very difficult for Russia or China) would not have helped Venezuela one bit.
It'd be more technically feasible for them to help Iran than Venezuela, and even that is not particularly feasible now, other than very indirectly.
>"would not have helped Venezuela one bit"
I think it would, meaning that right from that exact minute the US and Russia will be very busy and Venezuela left to it's own devices. Does not mean Venezuela would feel any better of course.
This is entering fantasy land.
There's no effective way of Russia to militarily help Venezuela and strike any US carrier. Same with China. You haven't proposed any because there is no feasible way.
Even if they could, such action would have been followed by the US knocking Venezuela out and taking them out of the equation. A neighboring ally of an actively engaged hostile power wouldn't be "left to its own devices".
We need to [develop military technology] because our enemies do it. I don't mean we have to commit war crimes because others do it.
It came later than I anticipated, but it did come after all. There is a reason companies like 9mother are working like crazy on various way to mitigate those risks.
I think it's the opposite. The human cost of war is part of what keeps the USA from getting into wars more than it already is - no politician wants a second Vietnam.
If war is safe to wage, then it just means we'll do it more and kill more people around the globe.
The troops were told they're headed for Armageddon this go round
And that is entirely the fault of American voters. The government is doing exactly what they said they would.
Safe for whom?
Safe for the aggressors, I mean. If war is easy and cheap for us to wage, we will do more of it, and likely make the world a worse place.
Your post reads as if you would rather those aggressors who threaten America to not be disposed of. How is the world a better place with the aggressors than without?
None of the recently attacked countries posed an imminent threat to the US.
In what kind of deranged world are we living that people are fighting against the notion that waging war on another country should be a costly decision!?
My, the Overton window has indeed shifted far.
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Bombing schools will certainly teach them not to chant "Death to America"
Can't imagine why they would be anti-American
Perhaps Trump shouldn't have ripped up the treaty Obama achieved with Iran. The one where we could pop in unannounced at any time to inspect facilities to make sure there's no nuclear bomb making capabilities.
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Trump has already claimed that he has destroyed all nuclear capability of Iran at the previous attack done by USA against Iran.
Claiming now that this other attack has the same purpose makes certain that USA has lied either at the previous attack or at the current attack.
When the government of a country is a proven liar, no allegations about how dangerous another country is are credible.
Moreover, just before the attack, during the negotiations between USA and Iran it was said that Iran accepted most of the new American requests regarding their nuclear capabilities, which had the goal to prevent them from making any weapons, but their willingness to make concessions did not help them at all to avoid a surprise attack before the end of the negotiations.
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That's cherry-picking. The Iranians said things, Trump said some other things, and your comment chooses to selectively believe some things the Iranians said (that their nuclear program wasn't entirely dismantled, in contradiction to Trump's claims) but not others (that they weren't pursuing nuclear weapons and the late Khamenei considered them immoral). It's now believed Israel was planning to kill Khamenei regardless of any nuclear talks, and forced the hand of the US.
Iran wasn't a threat to the US.
I don't care what Trump says. I care what the Iranians say. Here is an Iranian, Persian language interview with Ali Motahari, deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament:
https://www.iranintl.com/202204244448
He says:
In English:Like I said, you're cherry-picking. You believe some of what the Iranians say, and not the rest. You believe some of what Trump says, but not the rest.
And you do care what Trump says, since you're buying his bogus, self-contradicting justification for going to war with Iran.
Iran wasn't a threat to the US.
Edit: that 2022 interview you quoted from an Iranian not affiliated to any nuclear program or knowledgeable about it, and which later recanted/clarified it, has problems to say the least. Another example of cherry-picking. I'm not surprised it has since been amplified by Trump (a person whose opinion you don't care about) and by various Israeli news outlets.
So you claim that this high ranking Iranian government official was lying?
Judging from what I've read, he claims that's not what he was saying, and that it was his personal opinion at the time since he wasn't involved in any nuclear program. You're latching to one person's words, since recanted/corrected, because it helps the narrative you like: cherry-picking.
More importantly, do you claim Trump was lying? (I do, to be clear, but do you?).
Let me repeat it because this is important: Iran posed no threat to the US.
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I'm not an expert. Probably anti Western sentiment, anti any former allies of the deposed Shah, and pro Palestinian sentiment.
But in reality this doesn't matter, because you're now moving the goalposts: I didn't argue that Iran wasn't hostile to Israel.
I claimed that Iran's nuclear program was already destroyed for 10+ years (mission success, as claimed last year with total certainty by Trump), and that Iran didn't pose a threat to the US.
Now, if the US wants to fight Israel's wars, that's cool and dandy, but the majority of Americans don't support this. Remember "America First"?
If iranian politics would have allowed nuclear weapons they'd have them already. They could also have accepted gifts from some of their more friendly international relations.
Which it is well known that it hasn't been the case since the revolution, where the republic inherited the nuclear program the US pushed the king to pursue. The shia leaders consider such weapons immoral, and hence it seems like the main aim for the aggressors is to remove obstacles in Iran and rush them into getting nukes. It also has the side effect of increasing proliferation in Europe, with several states now moving towards extending or developing nuclear weapons.
This rhetoric about them getting nukes is a deception, it's for people who know little to nothing about Iran that are constrained to a rather racist world view. The animosity towards Iran mainly has to do with them having tried to move away from a monarchical type of government towards a more democratic, unlike US and israeli allies in the region, who are mostly kingdoms and extremely autocratic.
We're talking about Americans.
What genuine threat did Venezuela or Iran pose to Americans? Corporate interests don't count.
Do you not perceive a threat from a country with nuclear capability that chants "Death to America, Death to Israel" to be a threat to America? Venezuela I don't know about, but Iran was (is) most certainly a threat to America.
Iran has no nuclear weapons and no weapons capable of striking the US
Iran has a strong nuclear weapon development program. Negotiations could not halt it - they stall negotiations and continue development. So if they continue development during negotiations, why shouldn't the US continue her own parallel military route?
As for delivery, Iran does have missiles capable of launching a nuclear weapon at American assets in the Middle East, or American allies. Or even to just float it over on a ship.
Negotiations did halt it. Then Trump went back on the deal.
There's reports Iran agreed to limit themselves to only medical grade centrifuges as recently as last week.
And no, Iran does not have weapons capability to reach the US, period.
They fundamentally did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. A threat to American strategic goals is not an imminent threat to the American people.
Negotiations halted Iran's nuclear program for, as per words of the treaty, "10 to 15 years". That was in 2016. If that treaty were not torn up, then Iran would be allowed to unveil their nuclear weapon in January 16, 2026. Yes, two months ago.
No, they would be allowed to resume working on a nuclear weapon program, if a further treaty was not reached.
Well now you're not making any sense.
Is your claim that the deal was not preventing Iran from developing a nuke? Then why does the existence of the agreement matter either way?
Are you saying Iran would magically produce a nuke the very day the deal expired? Then why don't they have one today?
How does ending the agreement make it harder for Iran to get a nuke? How does "tearing it up" prevent anything that the agreement itself wasn't preventing?
Iran with nukes can't hold a candle to the threat posed by the USSR. Your logic would have turned the Cold War into a shooting war.
If it's moral to strike at a country with nuclear capability that talks constantly about your country's destruction, then it's no less acceptable for Iran to strike the US than the other way around.
You can't condemn one and condone the other on that basis.
You are 100% correct. That is exactly my point.
Iran has both reason and were developing capability to destroy a significant part of American national security. America absolutely must prevent that at any cost.
You could argue about how the rhetoric between the states got so bad that they each threatened each other's destruction. But the fact is that they got there.
North Korea engages in no less saber-rattling. Why is the US not attacking Kim Jong Un?
I'm not familiar enough with Korean culture to know if suicide-for-ideology is culturally acceptable and expected. In Islamic ideology that is the highest honour.
Ah, so in the end, your reasoning for attacking Iran is racism.
That is very boring, caveman logic.
No, my reasoning is culture. I do not live in the United States, I don't base my worldview on race.
There exists a culture for which it is an honour to kill Jews. Pretending that this culture does not exist is racism. Disregarding the differences in values of other cultures is the most disgusting form of racism - pretending that one's own culture is dominant or universal.
Treating culture as uniformly distributed and absolute is racism. Your racism is blinding you to truths, leading you to illogical conclusions like the idea that it's possible to make an accurate assessment of military threat based on "culture." Hence why I called it caveman logic - you're literally defining your level of fear of another group of humans based on how different you (erroneously) perceive them to be.
You seem quite concerned with the plight of the Palestinians so I'll use that as an example: Jewish people experienced the worst, most widescale crime against humans ever committed, and then a few decades later, a subset of Jewish people turned around and began doing the same (at a smaller, less industrialized scale). This demonstrates the perfect universality and programmability of a human, which includes "human culture."
Any human culture can be molded to justify any existent human action. To pretend otherwise is to engage in ethnocentrism - what you accused me off, the presumption that there's something special about your culture that prevents atrocities happening under it.
The second that makes your argument racist rather than logical (if you refuse to budge on the word "racist," swap in "prejudice" - the fallacies are the same either way) is the homogeneous angle you're applying. This should be an obviously fallacious statement: "Christianity is a violent culture that supports violence against Jewish people, discrimination against gay people, and school shootings." Why is it fallacious, though? I know lots of christians that have done all of the above, proudly tying it back to their religion. You see my point, right? You would, presumably, never walk into a room of white people and assume they all share identical values - do it in America, half probably are tearing their hair out in frustration at the values of the other half. Yet you do it to Islam / Arabs / Muslims, because, frankly, you are racist against Muslim people.
An argument that depends on making a blanket statement about a group of people fails for many reasons: categorization (how do you accurately and scientifically select who falls into this grouping and who doesn't?), resolution (how do you account for outliers within this grouping, and how do you determine who might be an outlier?), absolutism (how do you account for the fact that people change?), and due to above, how could you justify making any decisions based on a prejudiced framing?
Racist arguments are completely dependant on fallacy. With a rigid application of rational reasoning, they fall apart. They're illogical.
What about Red Scare interests? Venezuela traded with Cuba.
China threatens us, Russia threatens us, should we bombing them? Canada is threatened by us, demark, Spain, mexico, Cuba have all been threatened by us, should they be bombing us?
Your philosophy would see the whole world at war.
Yes, I don't believe we should pre-emptively "dispose of" them, as if we were talking about garbage instead of human beings.
Doesn’t this just lower the bar on going to war? Putting real lives on the line makes war a costly last resort.
True, but this doesn't in any way undermine the point that making war easier is not a good thing. It should be a costly decision, lest leaders of even those cultures find it too appealing.
In general I agree. 100% agree.
But the AI cat-for-war has left the box for both Iran and the US. Opposing US development of AI for warfare will not suppress US's adversaries from developing the technology.
> Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members.
I guess let the record state that I am deeply morally opposed to automated killing of any kind.
I am sick to my stomach when I really try to put myself in the shoes of the indigenous peoples of Africa who were the first victims of highly automatic weapons, “machine guns” or “Gatling guns”. The asymmetry was barbaric. I do hope that there is a hell, simply that those who made the decision to execute en masse those peoples have a place to rot in internal hellfire.
To even think of modernizing that scene of inhumane depravity with AI is despicable. No, I am deeply opposed to automated killing of any kind.
The Gatling Gun was first deployed in the US civil war, not in Africa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun
The “machine gun” has a more complicated history, and the first practical example may have been Gatling’s, or an earlier example used in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_gun
Forgive me I got the detail wrong. If your point was to deny that my imagined scenario never happened, read this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun
Basically all types of weapons have been used in all sorts of conflicts; the British used aircraft in their mandates, and the Italians used chemical weapons in Ethiopia. That said, I am not aware of any weapon which was developed specifically for use against a less technologically advanced adversary, most novel weapons are developed for use against peer-adversaries.
> That said, I am not aware of any weapon which was developed specifically for use against a less technologically advanced adversary, most novel weapons are developed for use against peer-adversaries.
This is a strange take that I didn’t expect to hear. I suppose that the strongest defensive systems do require the most sophisticated offensive systems to defeat, in theory. But there exists asymmetry there as well ($50k drone destroys $1B radar).
My take on weapons development is that there were plenty of mass killing (or mass punishment) devices developed specifically for use by colonial powers against indigenous peoples. This happened alongside weapons development for weapons intended for, as you put them, peer-adversaries.
Revolts happened, and colonial powers needed effective ways to keep indigenous peoples enslaved.
Our drones will fight their drones, and then whichever side loses, will have their humans fighting the other side's drones, and if the humans somehow win, they will fight the other side's humans. War doesn't have an agreed ending condition.
War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral. The only best choice is to fight at every turn making war easy. Our adversaries will, or likely already have, gone the autonomous route. We should be doing everything we can to put major blockers on this similar to efforts to block chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The logical end of autonomous targeting and weapons is near instant mass killing decisions. So at a minimum we should think of autonomous weapons in a similar class as those since autonomy is a weapon of mass destruction. But we currently don't think that way and that is the problem.
Eventually, unfortunately, we will build these systems but it is weak to argue that the technology isn't ready right now and that is why we won't build them. No matter when these systems come on line there will be collateral damage so there will be no right time from a technology standpoint. Anthropic is making that weak argument and that is primarily what I am dismissive of. The argument that needs to be made is that we aren't ready as a society for these weapons. The US government hasn't done the work to prove they can handle them. The US people haven't proven we are ready to understand their ramifications. So, in my view, Anthropic shouldn't be arguing the technology isn't ready, no weapon of war is ever clean and your hands will be dirty no matter how well you craft the knife. Instead Anthropic should be arguing that we aren't ready as a society and that is why they aren't going to support them.
When is war necessary, at the limit?
The problem in modern wars is that those who start them claim that they do this for survival, but the claim is not based on any real action of the adversary or on any evidence that the adversary is dangerous, but on beliefs that the adversary might want to endanger the survival of the attacker some time in an indefinite future, and perhaps might even be able to do that.
Nobody who starts a war today acknowledges that they do this for other reasons than "survival", e.g. for stealing various kinds of resources from the attacked.
It has become difficult to distinguish those who truly fight for survival from those who only claim to do this.
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> They have both an active nuclear program and a means to deliver a nuclear weapon.
No, they do not
Iran launched a 1-ton payload (e.g. nuclear capable) rocket with a 2000 km range two days ago. That rocket can threaten US assets and allies even into Europe. And, of course, and small ship or container ship even could carry a nuclear weapon into an American port.
There is no proof Iran has nuclear weapons.
This has been covered extensively, and this kind of misinformation is exactly the same thing that drove the US and half of NATO into the Iraq war.
Absolutely unbelievable this is happening again!
Iran currently does not currently have nuclear weapons. Iran has a nuclear program to develop nuclear weapons.
Here is an Iranian, Persian language interview with Ali Motahari, deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament:
https://www.iranintl.com/202204244448
He says:
In English:There is proof: there is no way the US and/or Israel would have done this if they knew that Iran had nuclear weapons.
> When war becomes inevitable, we are forced to choose between morality and survival.
The kind of modern wars we're discussing now are often not about survival. Often, the initiator of the war wants dominance rather than survival.
This completely changes the equation. I do pass judgement on those who would wage war to ensure their dominance and access to resources.
Yes, agreed 100%. Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent. The smaller states in the areas are under constant threat.
However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
> Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent.
Agreed that some countries seek to dominate other regions by force or threat, but you and I are not thinking of the same "groups".
> However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.
No, Iran poses no real threat to America, and according to Trump last year suffered a 10+ year setback in their nuclear ambitions. Do you think Trump was lying back then, now, or both?
The US is asserting dominance. Even Trump occasionally says so. Iran mostly poses a danger to their own citizens and, arguably, against Israel when conflict flares up in the region, but not to the US.
By the way, the current situation in Iran is heavily influenced by actions by the UK and the US in the region, back in the 50s. So maybe meddling is not the right course of action?
What do you mean, "hallucinates and kills people"? Killing people is the thing the military is using them for; it's not some accidental side effect. It's the "moral choice" the same way a cruise missile is — some person half a world away can lean back in their chair, take a sip of coffee, click a few buttons and end human lives, without ever fully appreciating or caring about what they've done.
I'm sure it was meant as "kills the wrong people."
People are always worried about getting rid of humans in decision-making. Not that humans are perfect, but because we worry that buggy software will be worse.
The people that actually target and launch these things do think about what they have done. It is the people ordering them to do it that don't. There is a difference, I hope.