Similarly, Wallach [283] discuss the topic of autonomous robotic weaponry and note that the US military is seeking to eventually transition to a state where the human operators of robot weapons are 'on the loop' rather than 'in the loop'. In other words, whereas a human was previously required to explicitly give the order before a robot was allowed to initiate possibly lethal activity, in the future humans are meant to merely supervise the robotʼs actions and interfere if something goes wrong.Human Rights Watch [90] reports on a number of military systems which are becoming increasingly autonomous, with the human oversight for automatic weapons defense systems—designed to detect and shoot down incoming missiles and rockets—already being limited to accepting or overriding the computerʼs plan of action in a matter of seconds. Although these systems are better described as automatic, carrying out pre-programmed sequences of actions in a structured environment, than autonomous, they are a good demonstration of a situation where rapid decisions are needed and the extent of human oversight is limited. A number of militaries are considering the future use of more autonomous weapons.

The weaponisation of AI has indeed already begun, so it is not a danger that needs pointing out. It suits the military to give drones, and so forth, greater autonomy, but it also suits the military to retain overall control....they are not going to build a God AI that is also a weapon, since there is no military mileagei n building a weapon that might attack you out of its own volition. So weaponised AI is limited agentive AI. Since the military want .to retain overall control, they will in effect conduct their own safety research, increasing the controlability of their systems in parallel with their increasing autonomy. MIRIs research is not very relevant to weaponised AI, because MIRI focuses on the hidden dangers of apparently benevolent AI, and on god AIs, powerful singletons.