Maybe if they were more accurate they would kill less people?
Drone strikes aren't going away, especially since there is widespread support among the American public for them (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-...). Thus, we should pursue both fronts: making drone strikes more safe, but also informing the public about the potential shortfalls and dangers of using such technologies.
The idea that making technology more sophisticated will inevitably increase its usage is a fallacy. Nuclear weapons technology improved substantially over the 20th century, and yet it still hasn't been used since 1945.
This country will continue to meddle in international affairs and, on occasion, get involved in bloody battles. Such is life. War is an integral part of our civilization and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. You can’t just wish it away.
I don't always know.
Wars exist because people are willing to kill and die for what they believe in. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means”
Less American military personnel will be put in harm's way as technology like this advances. Maybe wars will even be mostly unmanned remotely controlled machine-vs-machine in the future.
It's also possible that when a weapon is deemed technically capable, people will be more comfortable with broad use of weapons and with expanding lists of individuals targeted for extrajudicial killing.
You do not need advanced technology to build simple rockets with simple warheads and wreak havoc. These rockets are guided by nothing better than pointing and shooting. We see this in use in various paramilitaries around the world with little concern for civilian casualties: in Gaza, in Syria, in South Lebanon, in Yemen. If the West was similarly limited to such crude munitions then the civilian cost to destroying legitimate military targets would be enormous. Better guided munitions reduce civilian casualties and as such working on making munitions better-guided is indeed ethical.
If you think that not giving generals the tools to better avoid civilian casualties means they will simply not wage war in ways that endanger civilians, well history is pretty clear that this is quite erroneous. Giving generals the tools to wage war more ethically allows them to make decisions with fewer compromises e.g. civilian casualties.
This is not even to mention work on purely defensive munitions, e.g. Iron Dome, which is inherently ethical.
And if your opposition is rooted in a sense of pacifism, please, freedom is not free, it's not just a slogan. Anarchies (i.e. the lack of a sovereign government with a military defending territory) and their power vacuums result in warlords and the end of civil society. And that Malthusian outcome is clearly less ethical than almost any other. That's just human nature. Defense of civil society requires a military. Ideally, that military will act as ethically as possible while achieving its primary goal which is the stability (in face of external threats) necessary for civil society to flourish. There are two ways to make the military ethical: a) give it ethical tools so that it won't be forced to use less ethical means for achieving its raison d'être, b) set ethical policy. As sad that it may be that we have little control over the latter, as engineers we can have control over the former.