We don't even charge people when they blow up schools and hospitals with drone strikes now. Why would this be any different?

To be fair, the answer to the question "when somebody kills a schoolbus of kids, who gets charged with a warcrime?" was always "nobody"

As we now know, the actual answer is ~~“Nobody.”~~ the 50 kids who gets designated as "terrorists" afterwards.

FTFY - it's the American way.

That's also a legal issue with autonomous cars.

Autonomous cars can also get into basically the trolley problem. If an accident is unavoidable, but the car can swerve and kill its own passenger to avoid killing more people in a larger wreck, should it? And would that end up as more liability for whoever takes the blame?

When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime?

When a human in a plane drops a bomb on a school full of kids, we don't charge anyone with a war crime. Why would we start charging people with war crimes when we make the plane pilotless?

The autonomy of these killer toys is always overstated. As front-line trigger pullers, they're great. But they still need an enormous support staff and deployment team and IT support. If you want to blame someone for releasing a killer robot into a crowd of civilians, its not like you have a shortage of people to indict. No different than trying to figure out who takes the blame for throwing a grenade into a movie theater. Everyone from the mission commander down to the guy who drops a Kill marker on the digital map has the potential for indictment.

But nobody is going to be indicted in a mission where the goal was to blow up a school full of children, because why would you do that? The whole point was to murder those kids.

Israelis already have an AI-powered target-to-kill system, after all.

But in 2021, the Jerusalem Post reported an intelligence official saying Israel had just won its first “AI war” – an earlier conflict with Hamas – using a number of machine learning systems to sift through data and produce targets. In the same year a book called The Human–Machine Team, which outlined a vision of AI-powered warfare, was published under a pseudonym by an author recently revealed to be the head of a key Israeli clandestine intelligence unit.

Last year, another +972 report said Israel also uses an AI system called Habsora to identify potential militant buildings and facilities to bomb. According the report, Habsora generates targets “almost automatically”, and one former intelligence officer described it as “a mass assassination factory”.

The recent +972 report also claims a third system, called Where’s Daddy?, monitors targets identified by Lavender and alerts the military when they return home, often to their family.

Literally the entire point of this system is to kill whole families.

To be fair they are specifically testing AI Aimed and not fired. Firing is still up to and operator

Collateral damage.

Guns don't kill people. Autonomous robot dogs do.

Yep. That's exactly like every AI system employed by the IDF.

I feel like the answer would be the person who decided to kill the kids, right? they are the one who made the call to commit the war crime.

Worrying about who’s gonna get charged with a war crime, during a war, is the opposite of grounded. During a war the only question is “How do we stop the robots from killing the school full of children?”