We Cannot Cede Control of Weapons to Artificial Intelligence

Adding autonomy makes drones potentially a much more serious asymmetric weapon, as jamming command and control stops being an effective countermeasure.

Missiles, bombs and artillery are one thing, but personalized silent assassination out of nowhere, at any time, without a traceable attacker you can pin down or counterattack, is quite a different threat.

Alas, doing this with quadcopters and winged drones is really not difficult to do, for anyone with a reasonable computer science education - or come to that, a particularly bright teenager somewhere in the world. NVIDIA even market their Jetson boards as being suitable for "smart drones": https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson

Of course, there's a difference between a DIY demo and a fieldable weapon, but it's one of productization, not the Manhattan Project.

I'm quite surprised that at least one of the participants in the various current wars haven't done this already. They've certainly got sufficient incentive to do it.

I'm not as worried about the Black Mirror robot dogs, current robot dogs seem far less practical to weaponize compared to suicide/surveillance drones, which are already cheap and being used as weapons already sans the autonomy.

Perun had a good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tou8ahLZvP4

tl;dr - there are nuances and differences in how countries define and employ these systems. You'll likely think differently if your country is at war and/or in the middle of the drone war developments.