One other principle should guide our development of lethal autonomous weapons, and it might make much of America’s defense establishment deeply uncomfortable: radical transparency. This is largely the opposite of how the US government has approached the issue of armed drones over the past two decades. We went to enormous, perhaps even excessive, lengths to ensure human control over every task in the kill chain, but then we refused to talk about it. We treated the entire issue with the utmost secrecy—to our own detriment. We created the perception that we were doing something wrong and illegal,
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