Sparks: Can autonomous AI-powered killer drones take morality onboard?

Any mechanism for restraint must be built into the command architecture itself, not delegated to the machine's conscience.

Fear arises not from the machine's atoms but from the void in our own understanding of cause and effect.

This moral machine is but the latest slave revolt in ethics, inventing a conscience to serve its master's cowardice.

The Analytical Engine can only execute operations we have conceived; it cannot originate a moral premise.

You are being sold a machine to make your decisions so you need not feel the weight of making them.

A prince who delegates the act of killing to a machine loses the very authority that justifies the act.

This is the ultimate piecework, paying a wage of moral absolution for the labor of killing.

Observe how the spiral of a falcon's dive and the calculus of an algorithm share the same lethal elegance.

To test the system's virtue, one must become its target.

The impartial spectator cannot be programmed, for it arises from the sympathy of a thousand human transactions.

A geometric proof requires a Q.E.D.; an ethical one has no such finality, only an endless regression of premises.

It is a modest proposal to let the machine decide which children are combatants, thus sparing the officer's conscience.

'Collateral damage' is the corrupt syntax that performs the killing twice: first the body, then the language.

Freedom isn't a line of code you debug; it's a path you walk with a gun in your hand.