91av

Letter: The human element of the rise of killer robots (2)

Published 8 July 2026

From Matthew Stevens, Sydney, Australia

Your leader’s question of “whether [in warfare] a human should always be involved, ultimately responsible for the decision to pull the trigger, or whether machines can be allowed to act alone” assumes that there is a distinction. Yet in both cases, someone has made the decision to build and deploy the killer robots. Even when machines are set to act alone, a person has made the decision that a machine can pull the trigger.

Issue no. 3603 published 11 July 2026

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