I share your distaste for militarized AI (unless I mistake you?), but if AI are to be used in such applications then competent representation and examination of such use cases by a public ethics body would seem to me to be a good thing.
Granted, but there's much more than a binary (use/ban) discussion to be had here. It's important that we have open discourse about the design, manufacture, deployment, and general use of such things in order to avoid dangerous or highly objectionable outcomes.
There is more than one way to do something; the repercussions of those pathways may differ significantly.
yes if you dislike militarized AI you should discuss it.
the woman in question that runs the drone company is ex-military, so i would feel like she would be in favor of militarizing drones (albeit to be fair her drone company currently does not do that) and thus probably shouldn't be on the board in the first place
What? No. The fact that she's ex-military and runs a drone company is precisely why she should be on such a board.
If there is no one on the board with the relevant knowledge and experience to competently represent a given use case, then the board will likely be unable to produce results relevant to such use cases. For example, if I form a board to hash out software version control system best practices but actively exclude experts on distributed VCS such as git and mercurial, then the resulting "best practices" are unlikely to prove useful for anyone actually using a DVCS in reality.
My point here is that excluding her almost certainly won't actually do anything to prevent the development of militarized AI. Rather, it will simply reduce the likelihood that anything the board puts out has influence on such matters.
So, the idea of "discussing it" is to first exclude everybody who might hold an opinion different from the one you want to arrive at (preferably without even actually asking them - why bother to ask a person if she's for or against military drones if she served in the military so you already know everything about her views from one single factoid?). At which point I'm not sure why indeed waste time on having any council at all - a dozen people that think all the same can be replaced by just one person at 12x more efficiency.
