Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots

Evidence

This is a typical “Trojan horse” type of procedure: in the name of the eventual prospect of ethical killer robots, you win the acceptance of the development of killer robots pure and simple, even though, as their supporters themselves know full well, public opinion still is massively opposed to them. By presenting the process of automatization as itself automatic and ineluctable, and by generously proposing in advance to moderate its excesses, Arkin and his associates are masking the fact that they themselves are the extremely active agents of that very process, effectively promoting it by providing the justifications that will be needed for it to prosper. The more widespread the legend of the ethical robot becomes, the faster the moral barriers to the deployment of killer robots give way. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s interest in ‘the emergency of new ethical and political norms of war’ — this is the discursive mechanism by which those norms shift. — connects to: Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing; Ethical-robot advocacy lowers moral barriers to deploying lethal robots.; Drone design produces a strong moral buffering effect on operators — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 407 (+10 more)
• SEED: The ‘legend of the ethical robot’ as a moral-debarrier is a strong framing for an essay on technology PR as norm-evolution.