If they could make sure they are killing only the guy they wanted, and act on that using pinpoint precision?

Uh, actually, now that you mentioned it, that would be even more scary.

That would be totally consequence free assassination device. At least the civilian casualties put some lid on the tendency to wantonly fly around in glorified RC planes murdering people.

The way I see it, if you are intending to assassinate a person (i.e. kill them not part of a military engagement) you could at least have the decency to have operators on the ground, with visual range to the target to pull the trigger. That's skin in the game. That's proper balancing of the calculus.

When you remove the chance of your own guys getting hurt, you are lowering the threshold to apply deadly force.

The whole point of due process and so on is to guarantee human rights for all and more importantly, put checks and balances on the actions of the political leaders.

When it suddenly becomes "ok" to kill people in automated fashion around the globe, that's a serious threat to all civil liberties regardless if one is a US citizen or not.

I think a free and open society is the only reason US has any credibility in claiming a moral high ground and things like eliminating targets on the disposition matrix [0] without due process erodes that high ground quite effectively.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

Every military technology from bows and arrows to GPS is doing exactly what you are objecting to by lowering the danger to the attacker and increasing the success of a potential attack. Drones are an incremental step in that process. It just seems strange to me to draw the specific line at drones when we are seemingly fine with other advancements that are almost identical in effect like stealth technology. Once again, my argument is not that drones are good. My argument is that drones are not inherently more evil than other weapons.

I completely agree with your last three paragraphs. But once again, none of that is specific to drones. It is true whether the trigger is pulled by special forces soldier from feet away, from an manned aircraft thousands of feet in the air, or a pilot in trailer hundreds of miles away.

I accept a global superpower sometimes assassinates people, and perhaps sometimes for good reasons.

My main opposition is to the factory like efficiency in which these extra-judicial executions are carried out by the drone pilots in a cost effective manner.

It gives me associations with other human organizations in the past which have carried out their mission with cruel detachment and efficiency.

I can't really put my finger on it, but it's just something I feel Stalin or Himmler or Robespierre would have totally agreed with.

Automated elimination of the enemies of the state? Wonderfull!

I used to feel similarly about guided missiles during Operation Allied Force (when the US inadvertantly struck the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia).

My opinion on the topic has not translated into a reduction in automated warfare as a policy. On the plus side, independent of my opinion, technology has moved forward so that given similar circumstances, the embassy would at least have a chance that a drone pilot would realize during visual confirmation that the target has a big Chinese flag out front.