It’s true that humans are unreliable, even if we could guarantee a consistent set of moral and ethical standards as well as the appropriate tools and authority to enforce them at all times. We do, however, have to deal with 100% of the implications, one way or another. Machines don’t. Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov had to consider the world they would condemn their children to if they pushed the button, the missiles didn’t. These are imperfect devices made by imperfect beings, whose rules and goals can be changed more or less at will by whomever wields them. Offloading the responsibility of pulling a trigger or trampling someone’s legal or human rights to such a machine while insulating those in command from consequences threatens to make things worse at a speed and scale I don’t think we’ve seen before in all of our dark history. Meanwhile, it further concentrates immense and unchecked power in the hands of a relative scant handful of elites, all of whom exhibit the lack of ethical and moral fiber we were talking about to begin with.

Teaching something or someone to pull a trigger is trivial compared to teaching them not to. I have no reason to believe that automated weapons and surveillance will be more reliable than our world leaders or that the world will be safer with them in it.