Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

Good, this idea that all weapons are evil is an insane luxury belief.

There is a wide range of moral and practical opinions between the statement “all weapons are evil” and “global corporations ought not to develop autonomous weapons”.

Palantir exists, this would just be competition. It's not like Google is the only company capable of creating autonomous weapons so if they abstain the world is saved. They just want a piece of the pie. The problem is the pie comes with dead babies, but if you forget that part it's alright.

With or without autonomous weapons, war is always a sordid business with 'dead babies', this is not in itself a fact that tells us what weapons systems to develop.

Yet there are boundaries on which weapons we can and cannot develop: Nuclear, Chemical, Biological etc.

Indeed. Usually weapons are banned if the damage is high and indiscriminate while the military usefulness is low.

There is at this moment little evidence that autonomous weapons will cause more collateral damage than artillery shells and regular air strikes. The military usefulness on other other hand seems to be very high and increasing.

It seems like the sort of thing we shouldn't be wanting evidence of in order to avoid, though

Like skydiving without a parachute, I think we should accept it is a bad idea without needing a double blind study