Killer Algorithms

In a control room outside Las Vegas, a drone operator watches a figure move across a distant landscape. A decision must be made in seconds. Increasingly, that decision may not belong to a human being at all.

Killer Algorithms enters the world of autonomous weapons, where engineers, generals, and policymakers are quietly building systems that can identify targets and launch attacks without waiting for human approval. It traces how a Navy drone swarm of 103 aircraft flew in formation over the California desert without a single human directing their movements, how a Pentagon program called Project Maven used artificial intelligence to analyze battlefield footage, and how a weapon deployed in Libya may have hunted a human target entirely on its own, with no confirmed human hand on any trigger.

From classified testing grounds to emergency debates at the United Nations, the book examines how governments are racing to justify a technology that many of the scientists who built it now fear. The arms race is real, it is accelerating, and the major powers are not waiting for international law to catch up.

This is a gripping investigation into the future of war and the moment when the oldest question in warfare, who decides to take a life, is being handed to a machine. The question is no longer whether autonomous weapons can kill. The question is whether anyone will be accountable when they do.