Last November, two documents appeared within a few days of each other, each addressing the emerging legal and policy issues of autonomous weapon systems – and taking strongly incompatible approaches. One was from Human Rights Watch, whose report, Losing Our Humanity: The Case Against Killer
Robots, made a sweeping, provocative call for an international treaty ban on the use, production, and development of what it defined as “fully autonomous weapons.” Human Rights Watch has followed that up with a public campaign for signatures on a petition supporting a ban, as...