Yeah, imagine an Israeli robot grabbing the arms of a suicide bomber so he can't detonate, horrible.
Imagine instead summary execution by robot because an algorithm decides that you look enough like a known terrorist or your call metadata seems terroristish and you're in the wrong neighborhood. Imagine the violent collective punishment that can be brought to bear on a population in retaliation for something like a suicide bombing.
There's this weird blind spot in the robot weapons debate where we shudder in fear of robots committing acts that are already being committed in job lots by humans every day. We don't need machines to be inhumane! The problem is not weapons, the problem is human beings choosing to do bad things, and scapegoating robots will do absolutely nothing to fix that.
I'm saying I think they can have the effect of making it easier for a person to kill more people with less risk of consequence and that the lack of consequence makes violence easier to turn to as a solution. I am not afraid of robots, I am afraid of humans granted the ability to shield themselves from consequence for killing.
Back to the original point of the article it is important that international standards limiting such devastating weapons be enacted and enforced. Even Assad after being caught using chemical weapons was forced to step back and many robotic weapons, especially autonomous ones, should probably be in the same category for the same reason. These things are going to be developed so we need to act now to limit their use not wait until a calamity has struck.
One of the reasons I'm skeptical about the importance of this is, I guess I still don't understand what the nightmare scenario is. You call these weapons "devastating" and say that they will lead to even more death and suffering than currently existing weapons. How? An autonomous robot with a gun can't kill you any more dead than a human with a gun, and as Assad and Putin have demonstrated the lack of robots didn't keep them from just sending humans instead.