Israel’s use of AI in Gaza is coming under closer scrutiny

FOR OVER a decade military experts, lawyers and ethicists have grappled with the question of how to control lethal autonomous weapon systems, sometimes pejoratively called killer robots. One answer was to keep a “man in the loop”—to ensure that a human always approved each decision to use lethal force. But in 2016 Heather Roff and Richard Moyes, then writing for Article 36, a non-profit focused on the issue, cautioned that a person “simply pressing a ‘fire’ button in response to indications from a computer, without cognitive clarity or awareness”, does not meaningfully qualify as “human control”.