ABSTRACT
As a field of research as well as an issue of diplomatic concern, autonomous weapons and questions surrounding their potential international regulation have undergone a remarkable development. Weapon autonomy is widely considered a military development of paramount importance. It has been aptly described as “the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms” and arguably represents, in a sense of literally raising questions of life and death, the most consequential application of artificial intelligence (AI) in a military context. Weapon autonomy, including the critical functions, is not new, but recent innovations in AI allow its development and application on a much larger scale. Paul Scharre was among the first to acknowledge and analyze the operational risks conjured up by fighting at machine speed. Physicist Jurgen Altmann and political scientist Frank Sauer later developed these notions further by mapping the risks identified by Scharre onto the strategic notions of arms race and crisis instability.
