The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as other nations arm ai enabled drones with anti air missiles. There's no time for 'human in the loop' when the first to act survives. Thus down the slippery slope we go. In 20 years time we'll probably have aircraft that do figure eights over enemy territory for hours before automa…
Ethics don't go out the window because of autonomy. It's dark, but it's not somehow easy to shrug off as "ok no human then no ethics". We already have semi-autonomous weapons such as CIWS (Goalkeeper/Phalanx) which are autonomous because it's very tedious for a human to sit idle and wait for threats and then it's really hard to hit them. Perfect job for a robot. But the ethical job of the human in that case is ensuring that the weapon isn't armed if there is too high risk of collateral damage (These sit on ships, typically, so a human decides whether it's safe to arm the weapon given the situation around the vessel).
The dumbest autonomous weapons are mines, they are hundreds of years old. The ethical decision is made when laying down the mine, not when the explosion is triggered. So yes it's a slippery slope, but the "human in the loop" isn't only ethical when it's the kill decision. There is a "human in the loop" when laying a mine too. The ethics involved consists of weighing the risk of killing the wrong target, properly documenting where they are planted and so on. There is no human "in the loop" at the time the mine kills someone. But that doesn't somehow throw ethics out the window. The person deploying the mine - or the slaughterbot - is the person in the loop.
> In 20 years time we'll probably have aircraft that do figure eights over enemy territory for hours before automatically engaging 'military aged males'.
I think that is unlikely, but possibly "armed" personnel. We already have craft that do figure eights for hours before automatically engaging specific signatures of vehicles (if we'd want to). And as I said, even artillery shells do this. But yes, finding a concentration of troops and deciding whether they are soldiers/civilian isn't even 20 years away.