A robot, a bomb, and 6 dead people in Dallas.
Why a robot blowing up Micah Xavier Johnson is not the same thing as a police officer killing him with a gun.
On July 7, 2016 in Dallas, Texas, Micah Xavier Johnson opened fired during a Black Lives Matter protest. He killed five police officers and injured two citizens and eight police officers. After periodically engaging in gunfight and sustaining several gunshot wounds, police followed Johnson’s blood trail and found him sequestered in a parking garage and a standoff ensued. This is not an article about this event being the first time police have used a drone/robot to kill a United States citizen. This is an article discussing the implications of what it means for police to be able to kill citizens with robots without a trial or oversight.
After police became dissatisfied with Johnson’s behavior, a robot — normally used to neutralize bombs — was affixed with a bomb, driven by police near Johnson, and detonated, killing him.
In Tennessee v. Garner (1985) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled:
“deadly force…may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others.”
The action of the police really depend on the suspect’s capacity for future human harm. Police didn’t shoot and kill James Holmes — the ‘Batman shooter’ — when they apprehended him, despite Holmes being a suspect of mass homicide. The police function as the ears/hands of the state, judges are the brain, and defense and prosecutorial lawyers are the angels on each shoulder arguing their side. Due process exists for a very good reason: to take time to gather facts in order to act rationally and with ethical superiority.
If the police did have the option to wait Johnson out, but chose not to, they collapsed the power of judges and lawyers, all down to a militarized drone. Conversely, if the police didn’t have an option but to kill this suspect, the use of weaponized drones on citizens is ethically dubious. Use of drones to kill suspects is not equivalent to sending in a human to kill a suspect. Why? Because there are vastly different economic and skin-in-the-game ethical issues.
1) No-skin-in-the-game Problems
For thousands of years, fighters had to temper their desired aggression against their own mortality. Drone-enabled aggression removes this natural counterbalance; exchanging an unquantifiable human cost for an economic cost:
Drone-enabled aggression creates a paradigm in which one fighter’s effect is multiplied in a manner constrained only by economic cost.
This no-skin-in-the-game effect is categorically different than a technologically enhanced weaponry (think: a fighter with a bigger gun or more armor). Drones allow, effectively, the fighter to be virtualized. The aggressor can export all of the violence and shares no exposure to that violence.
“When domestic law enforcement officers can use force from a distance, it may become too easy for them to do so, and the inevitable result will be that these weapons are over-used…” Jay Stanley, ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Five Reasons Armed Domestic Drones Are a Terrible Idea
2) Non-linearities / Aggression Leveraging
Drone-enabled aggression also creates a paradigm in which there are perverse nonlinearities / economies of scale. An ex-drone operators state in Vice’s article “The Dawn of Killer Robots” that he regularly operated 16 drones at once. When the use of this technology is leveraged, you can only have blow ups in ethical failure but not ethical successes. Human fallibility and transgressions will be amplified by this leveraged aggression. If 100 pilots are acting ‘optimally’, an error of the 100th pilot doesn’t poison the remaining 99 pilots. Once you start leveraging pilots — as is the case with drone operators — one erroneous drone operator can, unintentionally or not, poison the remaining 99 drones.
3) Externality Problems
Use of drones has caused particularly pernicious externalities that the USA is only realizing now. Weaponized drones create hydras of political resistance. With the decrease in cost to aggression and the removal of contextual awareness, over use of militarized drones turns ambivalent bystanders into enemies when they are inadvertently attacked.
Conclusion
We should also be cautious against anything that increases the efficiency of homicide. Governments are the only entities which have the economic capability to fund the development and purchase of weapons of sophisticated technological destruction. If peace is our goal, we should lobby the state to refrain from growing that capacity.
Related Articles:
Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing
Police ‘Killer Robot’ Used in Dallas Stirs Human Rights Controversy
A Drone Was Used to Blow up a US Citizen Without Trial Yesterday. Let That Sink In
