RAW co-director Jessica Dorsey has been quoted in two major outlets this week, contributing legal and ethical expertise to a rapidly intensifying debate about autonomous weapons systems and human control over lethal force.
In the Financial Times, Dorsey responded to remarks by UK armed forces minister Al Carns, who suggested military necessity may require removing humans from targeting decisions in certain circumstances. While international law contains no explicit prohibition, she cautioned that doing so could place significant pressure on existing legal frameworks governing responsibility, foreseeability, and civilian protection.
In The Guardian‘s feature on AI-powered killer drones and machine ethics, she raised a more fundamental concern: that morality cannot be adequately captured in algorithmic rules. Determining whose morality an autonomous system would follow is itself a profound difficulty, particularly given the UN’s ongoing failure to reach consensus on autonomous weapons governance. War demands contextual judgment, legal precision, and accountability that AI systems cannot replicate. If flawed legal reasoning is encoded into autonomous systems from the outset, it risks being repeated at enormous scale. “War is filled with so many variables and it is a given that things will go wrong. And when that happens at AI-like speed, it is difficult to unravel.”
