Aiding Designers, Operators and Regulators to Deal with Legal and Ethical Considerations in the Design and Use of Lethal Autonomous Systems

The focus of this paper is how to design legal and ethical behaviour into Semi/Autonomous Systems (S/AS) that work within a System-of-Systems (SoS) context, in either a military or civilian environment. Its intention is to explore the problem domain, question the comprehensiveness of current work in this area and postulate a series of issues that the authors feel need to be addressed if serious progress is to be made in an area of considerable interest to governments, manufacturers and users of theses systems and indeed the general public. It should be read as a discussion document.