ABSTRACT
Characterization of warfare involving robotics, nanotechnology, warrior enhancement, cyber conflict (including the rise of “state-sponsored hacktivism”) and the incorporation of various forms of machine intelligence and “deep learning” into a variety of military operations. How increasing reliance on these emerging military technologies challenges (and in extreme cases, threaten wholly to obviate) conventional moral and legal thinking, ranging from the application of classical just war doctrine (JWT) to the perceived limitations of current international humanitarian law (IHL). Critics, especially, frequently decry the impact of military technology for its alleged dehumanizing, devalorizing, and deskilling effects on human combatants, as well as the negative impact on human rights and human dignity and its prospects for weapons proliferation and increasing the prospects for war. Such widespread anxieties have in turn prompted profound concern and spirited multilateral discussions of possible revisions in the understanding and specific statutes enshrined in both law and morality that might prove necessary to address the perceived deficiencies in each.
