In March this year, the Donald Trump administration announced that American policy didn’t prohibit the “development or employment” of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). A few months later, it admitted to positioning weapons in space. Both instances set precedents for other countries and raise several questions about what is acceptable in a war.

Every technological revolution in warfare has tested the rules, customs, and moral restraints that seek to limit its consequences. For centuries, war was governed by conventions grounded in the understanding that even conflict must have limits. These reflected fundamental distinctions between combatant and civilian, military necessity and unnecessary suffering, and what could be and couldn’t be done. Aerial warfare in the 20th century eroded these boundaries. The 1937 bombing of Guernica by the Nazis became the defining symbol of this shift, demonstrating that urban populations could become targets of aerial devastation. Furthermore, the trajectory of US conduct illustrates how quickly moral restraint surrenders to military utility. In September 1939, President Franklin D Roosevelt appealed to European governments to renounce the aerial bombardment of civilians and unfortified cities. Yet, within six years, the very power that pleaded for restraint rained atomic destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, it is pioneering the weaponisation of space and artificial intelligence (AI).

Whenever mankind discovers newer ways to subdue an adversary, the response is rarely to outlaw the technology. Instead, armies adapt to it until devastation becomes routine. History, thus, offers an unyielding lesson: Technology does not wait for law.

AI now threatens to cross an even more perilous boundary — the divide between the human who decides and the........

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