Anderson & Waxman: Debating Autonomous Weapon Systems, Their Ethics, and Their Regulation Under International Law

Kenneth Anderson (American Univ. - Law) & Matthew C. Waxman (Columbia Univ. - Law) have posted Debating Autonomous Weapon Systems, Their Ethics, and Their Regulation Under International Law (in The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation, and Technology, Roger Brownsword, Eloise Scotford, & Karen Yeung eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

An international public debate over the law and ethics of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) has been underway since 2012, with those urging legal regulation of AWS under existing principles and requirements of the international law of armed conflict, on the one side, in argument with opponents who favor, instead, a preemptive international treaty ban on all such weapons, on the other. This Chapter provides an introduction to this international debate, offering the main arguments on each side. These include disputes over defining an AWS, the morality and law of automated targeting and target selection by machine, and the interaction of humans and machines in the context of lethal weapons of war. Although the Chapter concludes that a categorical ban on AWS is unjustified morally and legally — favoring the law of armed conflict’s existing case-by-case legal evaluation — it offers an exposition of arguments on each side of the AWS issue.