How would autonomous weapons systems work?

It depends on how autonomous they are. “There’s a type of fire-and-forget weapon where the weapon itself decides, ‘O.K., this is what I see happening in the battlefield, and I think I’m going to have to take out this particular tank because I think this tank is the command tank,’” says Work. This is his definition of a true lethal autonomous weapon system: an independent weapon that decides everything about who and what it destroys once a human has unleashed it.

As deputy secretary of defense between 2014 and 2017, Work was responsible for carrying out the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy, a plan to counter potential adversaries’ numerical advantages by putting innovative technologies at the core of United States military doctrine. The United States’ first offset, in President Eisenhower’s day, built on America’s nuclear advantage; a second offset in the 1970s and ’80s emphasized the nation’s advances in computers and missile-guidance technology. For Work, the third offset meant leveraging artificial intelligence and machine autonomy to create a smarter, faster network integrating humans and machines. It also meant watching how other states and nonstate actors developed their own autonomous capabilities, from expendable unmanned aerial vehicles to tanks or missile batteries augmented by artificial intelligence.