The obvious counter-point is that robots don't get angry, scared, or kill people randomly. In policing, they don't have a sense of self-preservation, and will never attack first in fear. In war, they don't rape or pillage. They don't have a sense of revenge, or bigotry. Surely, they can be *used* for such things, but they are in that respect no more dangerous then the people who already do these things, and still potentially less so.
Personally, I am against the use of weaponized drones in totality.
The use of weaponized drones removes the risk to personel that war implies, making it more attractive to use warfare to get what a government wants.
The same could be said for the use of stealth bombers against nations with no adequate air defenses, but for some strange reason the US isn't carpet bombing African states to get their riches...
Well yeah, you can't just No CB some random place. What he's saying is that the risks entailed by action are lower, so action can be taken more freely where it can already be justified. Which is not an ideal state of affairs, given the average quality of justifications we've been seeing. Maybe one day we will see drones flying over African countries blowing up random stuff to 'ensure regional stability.'
No CB?
I think your argument fails as soon as one considers the converse: To ensure better justifications, we should increase the amount of danger military our troops are exposed to. Which is a fairly insane thing to say - nobody would demand stopping the use of body armor and spotter drones, for example - but is (logically) equivalent to what you're saying, since there's nothing magical about the status quo.
Precisely. By the logic of outlawing them purely because they make war "more ethical to wage", we may as well repeal the Geneva Conventions and start subjecting enemy soldiers to summary executions again. Hang anyone suspected of collaborating with the enemy, while we're at it. Hell, maybe if we started firebombing cities again we could wrap our wars more quickly, especially if we could start using Mustard Gas as well. After all, all of it can be done back to us, so policy makers will finally stop the madness, right? 12,000 years of warfare at an end, simply because we made it too horrible to use! I mean WW1 stopped all wars forever, right? Well, WW2 stopped all wars forever, right?