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A recent report on artificial intelligence and war commissioned by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that the technology is set to massively magnify military power. Greg Allen, coauthor of the report and now an adjunct fellow at nonpartisan think tank the Center for New American Security, doesn’t expect the US and other countries to be able to stop themselves from building arsenals of weapons that can decide when to fire. “You are unlikely to achieve a full ban of autonomous weapons,” he says. “The temptation for using them is going to be very intense.”

“That time and energy would be much better spent developing regulations,” she says. International laws such as the Geneva Convention that restrict the activities of human soldiers could be adapted to govern what robot soldiers can do on the battlefield, for example. Other regulations short of a ban could try to clear up the murky question of who is held legally accountable when a piece of software makes a bad decision, for example by killing civilians.