Are there any specific plans by any military or defence company to build lethal robots that select their own targets?
Some have argued for a few years that US military drones are a harbinger of this age of killer robots. But I disagree. They have similar involvement from people in the use of their weapons systems as do manned strike aircraft. Arguably decisions are better made with the use of drones, because the decision to fire is not made by someone in fear of their own life, as it is with a manned aircraft, and they are thus able to be more dispassionate.
A pilot in a plane is not really able to gain an appreciation of the situation on the ground. Travelling over a battlefield at several hundred feet and several hundred knots does not permit you to take a lot in. Instead, aircrews rely on what they are seeing in video monitors. Drone operators are better able to consider what they are looking at on the ground with larger, higher-definition video monitors and in a state of relative calm.
It is something of a philosophical question as to just what an autonomous killing machine is if you maintain we do not already have them. All types of guided missiles and bombs are under robotic control once they are fired, and seek out their target by computer. Guided missiles have existed since at least the Second World War. The German V1 and V2 missiles had autonomous guidance which employed methods from before the age of electronic digital computers.
We can even look back to more primitive weapons and arguably see the same principle in place. A landmine (or even a sea mine) is a device that goes off automatically in response to some event, such as a switch being depressed, or a wire being tripped. It is a fair point, however, that landmines were banned by international treaty. But even before the invention of explosives, booby traps existed.
Having machines able to do all fighting might make war seem less risky for belligerents, which would be a bad thing. Unless, of course, your enemy has an equal or greater capability. It was once thought that nuclear weapons would make nations who had them, like the US, able to dominate the globe. On the other hand, they made it very difficult to make a war winnable, and so no two nuclear powers have yet gone to war with one another.
