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Notes -
When the first line is "The New York Times reports" take anything that follows with a solid helping of salt.
As is often the case in these sorts of stories, the headline is simultaneously true and also misleading. Yes "The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans" in the sense that getting drones/missiles/etc... to the point where they can independently recognize/identify a target or threat (and more pointedly, do so on a small enough footprint that the process can be run in something resembling real time) is a field of active study. That's not the same thing as handing the keys to Skynet. The irony is that the end goal of such research is actually the inverse of what is being portrayed. Killing everything in a grid square is pretty straight forward. Killing one specific thing and only that thing is a much harder problem. Nor are the applications for such research purely military, a major issue for both the aerospace and automotive industries is currently "See and Avoid" IE giving autopilots and self-driving cars the ability to recognize obstacles and navigate around them rather than simply following a preset route, likewise the ability to respond to conditional cues like a cop trying to pull them over or wave them through an intersection. But you don't see breathless articles about training self-driving cars to kill even though there a massive amount of overlap in the implementation.
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