Creating moral buffers in weapon control interface design

We examine the ethical and social issues surrounding the design of human-computer interfaces that are designed for control of highly autonomous weapons systems. With the improvements of global positioning satellite communications and control algorithms, it is currently possible to launch weapons. These systems are highly autonomous in that they do not need constant human supervision and manual control for operation and indeed, only require human intervention when a change in a goal state is required. In the swarm concept, human decision makers are removed even further from the decision-making loop.