http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of- ... in-1292050

Everybody wants to see one, the problem will be who owns it...

The human race is doomed. Even if the big governments agree, if the robots are autonomous, cheap and easy to build, who will even know who has put them into the field.

I suggest they read "Kill Decision" by Daniel Suarez, then come back and talk about how good autonomous drones and robots are... Idiots.

I sincerely hope they aren't going to base international law on sci fi thrillers. That would be utterly stupid.

Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply...

No, it was supposed to be a flippant remark, but the current head-long rush into automated weapon systems seems like the powers involved have read / watched the sci-fi dystopian novels about automated weapon systems and only seen the cool tech and ignored the story...

But that is also unrealistic. All these people who think they are seriously criticising an important moral issue raised by increasingly autonomous man made objects are deluded by sci fi.

A flying vehicle with a missile would not be autonomous in anything like the sense that you described. It would have to run a complex algorithm just to tell a burger van from a tank. If it is deemed good enough at that discrimination, perhaps, under some circumstances, it may be provided with a task that selects objects of the tank class and engages them with objects of the missile class.

Everything else you are imagining is an illusion provoked be the ambiguity within the idea of autonomy.