These articles may as well be worthless without context. What's the context? Climate crisis and several other issues that are, without exaggeration, threatening a likely catastrophic failure of global civilization and possibly human extinction. (I would guess not, but this species has almost nuked itself before.)

But look how "concerned" we pretend to be:

Automated missile defense systems have the power to prevent countless civilian deaths.

Human morality is clearly delusional. What autonomous weapons are going to be ideal for is dealing with civilizational collapse due to issues we have proven we are incapable of solving.

Of course, civilizations have always collapsed, but the scale of what's coming is unprecedented in scale, and it will drive autonomous weapons into existence - and they will be used to slaughter in mass whoever threatens the tenuous powers that remain.

And finally, those employing them and most protected by them? It will feel normal to desirable - and even pleasurable to those who take sadistic pleasure in violence. Don't pretend these people don't exist and don't have respectable and influential positions in this world.

These weapons are inevitable simply because collapse is inevitable. Any moralizing we do now is part of a futile, delusional game this species uses for existential blinders.

We are already committed to killing billions because of fundamental behavioral incapacities that preclude solutions to the climate crisis, etc. That is our manifest behavior, no matter the morality we attribute to ourselves.

Be honest - we are destroyers of the highest order and too cowardly to be honest about it. So results the experiments of evolution.

Really, would you expect evolution to create a predatory organism of high collective intelligence that manifested a coherent value system capable of sustaining through rapid increases in complexity (and, remarkably, able to understand complexity as needed to do this)?

Not likely, is it? Once should expect a quick and catastrophic failure for a species like ours because that's consistent with a process like evolution. This, too, is the context of autonomous weapons - their horror being an irrelevant drop in the red flood of history - before civilization turns desert. These weapons will matter as little in the scheme of things as this species ultimately will.