If that seems extreme, consider the self-driving car problem. 30,000 people in the US alone are killed per year in car accidents involving human drivers. What is the acceptable number of motor vehicle related deaths per year when all cars are self-driving?

Obviously because those humans then share and bear the moral dilemma of doing it or not. Which also affects the outcome, as opposed to just being some inconsequential detail. Humans can demand out of an injust war (as they've done time and again). Killing machines can not.

It's the difference between blindly following orders (which not even all Nazi's did) and being able to have a change of heart.

It's also the sheer (number of magnitudes) more killing efficiency of the killing algorithms, when a machine could kill 10000 people in the time it takes for a single human to make a decision about 1 of them -- until we find there's a != when we needed == in the algorithm.

    > 30,000 people in the US alone are killed per year in car
    > accidents involving human drivers. What is the acceptable number
    > of motor vehicle related deaths per year when all cars are
    > self-driving?

What we won't have would be Vasili Arkhipovs, Oskar Schindlers and Chris Taylors...

This is an odd statement. In my reading of historical battles, I've never seen a mention of the idea that soldiers before 1950 did not shoot to kill when ordered to.

However, the original statistic is apparently from a not so credible source, a study by SLA Marshall in WWII that's not so well regarded. This thread goes into some depth:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_t...

Not sure what the truth of it is.