Executives have always used decision-making tools. That’s not the point. The point is that the executive can’t point to the computer and say “I just did what it said!” The executive is the responsible party. She or he makes the choice to follow the advice of the decision-making tool or not.
The scary thing for me is when they've got an 18 year old drone operator making shoot/no-shoot decision on the basis of some AI metadata analysis tool (phone A was near phone B, we shot phone B last week...).
You end up with "Computer says shoot" and so many cooks involved in the software chain that no one can feasibly be held accountable except maybe the chief of staff or the president.
More than any other organization, the military can literally get away with murder, and they're motivated to recruit and protect the best murderers. It's only by political pressure that they may uphold some moral standards.
In most cases today if we don't attribute a direct crime solely to one person but instead to an organisation everyone avoids criminal prosecutions. Its only the people who didn't manage to spread the blame through the rest of the organisation that go down.
