Army of None

Paul Scharre

Autonomous weapons and the question of institutional control.

Scharre asks what happens to accountability, law, and the ethics of violence when the decision to use lethal force is delegated to a machine. The question is not only military; the same delegation of consequential decisions to autonomous systems is happening in finance, credit, and access to essential services. The institutional control problem — who is responsible when the algorithm decides — is the defining governance question of the agentic era, and Scharre sets it up with the moral clarity it deserves.