- Automation panic focuses on ‘killer robots’ while missing a crucial shift: combat judgment is being commodified by corporate software.
- Firms like Palantir reshape how wars are fought, embedding procedures that keep ‘human control’ as a legal and ethical fig leaf.
- The fetish of automation shields private companies from responsibility while accelerating market-driven decision-making in conflict.
Automation as a Cover for Corporate Control
The debate about “killer robots” — fully autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without human input — has dominated public headlines and moral outrage. That fury, however, risks obscuring a more pervasive and immediate transformation: the commodification of combat judgment through corporate software. Rather than replacing humans outright, defense tech companies are re-architecting how decisions are packaged, sold, and offloaded to proprietary systems that preserve only the minimum procedural “human control” required to deflect responsibility.
From Tools to Judgment-as-a-Service
Private firms are not merely supplying sensors or weapons; they are offering judgment-as-a-service. By wrapping predictive analytics, target recommendation engines, and decision-support workflows into commercial platforms, companies make interpretations and recommendations fungible. The result is a market in which battlefield judgment becomes a purchasable component, standardized and optimized for scale rather than deliberation.
Palantir and the New Architecture of War
Companies such as Palantir have become emblematic of this shift. Their software aggregates data, models probable outcomes, and surfaces action suggestions — all under a branded interface. Even when humans remain in the loop, the structure and presentation of information steer choices toward what the system prioritizes, subtly shaping accountability and outcomes. The human operator may authorize an action, but the contours of that decision were preconfigured by corporate design.
Why ‘Human Control’ Can Be a Legal Shield
Retaining a form of human approval allows militaries and vendors to claim compliance with ethical or legal norms. This procedural human control becomes a shield: it satisfies formal requirements while deflecting substantive responsibility back onto the ambiguous interplay of operator, interface, and vendor. The deeper ethical problem is that responsibility becomes dispersed — and commodified — across a supply chain.
Consequences and the Urgency of Public Scrutiny
The fetish for automation — the belief that increasing machine control is inherently superior — normalizes a corporate role in life-and-death decisions. This trend concentrates influence in a handful of firms, locks militaries into vendor ecosystems, and reduces democratic oversight. The danger is not only technological error, but a marketplace that values efficiency and scalability over moral judgment.
What to Watch For
Policymakers and the public should demand transparency about how decision-support systems are designed, who owns the models, and how accountability is allocated. Debates framed exclusively around “killer robots” miss the immediate policy choices: whether to allow corporations to package and sell judgment itself.
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Image Referance: https://jacobin.com/2026/01/fetishism-automation-ai-warfare-palantir