The Martens Clause appears to be the key to resolving much of the dispute over autonomous weapons systems because it provides the necessary grounding for moral questions in international law, and it gives an opening for us to actually grasp what might be considered the "dictates of public conscience." In other words, we can put to side the question of whether technology can act in a particular way at a particular time, and instead ask whether the technology should do so. As the International Committee of the Red Cross explains, "there is a related question of whether the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience (the Martens Clause) allow life and death decisions to be taken by a machine with little or no human control." But how would we begin to say that autonomous weapons systems uphold or violate the "principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience?" How would we know whose principles are upheld or what "humanity" really believes?

Nobody wants a robot apocalypse. From the mechanical worker's revolt in R.U.R. (the play that gave us the word "robot") to the bleak, nuke-scarred hellscapes of the Terminator and Matrix films, the idea of humanity destroyed by tools of its own creation is compelling, if still the domain of fiction. To keep the apocalypse firmly in the realm of the speculative, today the International Committee of the Red Cross released an unusual statement for a humanitarian group: "Decisions to kill and destroy are a human responsibility." The Red Cross isn't encouraging human decisions to kill and destroy. Instead, it's arguing that if such decisions are going to be made (and little in human history suggests they won't be), then it's really important that it is actual humans with that authority and power, not lethal autonomous weapon systems.