I think it's naive to think their primary focus will be collateral damage. Is that really the focus in any war at all? https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/166

I think it's naive to think their primary focus will be collateral damage. Is that really the focus in any war at all? https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casualties-civilian https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casua... And that's just the targeting of the drones themselves. But how accurate is the intelligence targeting? Post-Snowden we found out that they were killing people mainly based on what SIM card the targets carried with them. Plus, they consider any male that is killed and above 16 years old as a terrorist. It's harder not to be "accurate" when that's your definition of a target... Also, you're forgetting one aspect of this. The cheaper the tech becomes, the easier it will be used. Just like we now kill 100x more people with drone strikes that we did with airstrikes, in the future we may be kill 100-1,000x more people with automated drones, because it's so much easier to "get rid of the baddies". Do you actually think they'll hire 100x more people to operate those machines and "have final say"? Yeah, no way that's how they'll think about it - unless we make them think differently about it and not to allow the automated kill machines to ever be built/sent. I mean, given the type of politicians the U.S. government tends to have these days, which option do you think they'll choose? A 10-year dragged out war against a group like ISIS, or "just sending 10,000 automated drones" into multiple "hot areas" and "finish the job within a month"? Can you not see how their logic would go, and that we'll actually need a lot of people to oppose that type of thinking to ensure it will not happen? But will there be a lot of people to ensure that doesn't happen, if say a terrorist group takes out the White House? Or will everyone think "those 100,000 people all killed automatically by the drones deserved it for destroying our White House!!". Heck, Trump already asked the military "for the biggest bomb they can send" - a bomb that was built but never used before - and it wasn't even a situation of the US being under huge immediate threat at the time. It was mainly done for PR purposes for Trump to show how macho he is and how he "gets things done." The worst part about it is that the media seemed gleeful about it, rather than condemning him. I think it would be best to ensure the machines are not built in the first place. There are too many trigger-happy people that would send such drones out.