“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”

That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.