FYI, I’ve branched out to defending killer robots in other publications. Here’s my Politico column today:

The risk is that we’ll take outlandish dystopian scenarios seriously and allow a poorly informed Luddism, combined with the special pleading of potentially threatened incumbent industries, to crimp technological advance.
Robots have had terrible PR going on a century now with little or no justification. What have they ever done to anyone, besides vacuum the corners of our houses and maybe deliver a pizza? On the basis of the historical record, it is robots who should fear humans, since we are guilty of every imaginable crime, sometimes on an unspeakable scale, while robots have minded their own business.
The phrase “killer robots” is irresistible to people and, of course, has, shall we say, negative connotations. After all, robots are just a tool, like any other.
The police already avail themselves of all sort of mechanical implements that assist their efforts to track down suspects and, if necessary, kill them, from radios to cars to battering rams to helicopters to, of course, firearms. If we trust a police officer with, say, a Glock 19 — a lethal weapon — there’s no good reason to deny him or her a killer robot during a mass shooting or hostage-taking.
It’s always easy to say someone else should put themselves in harm’s way. There will come a day when insisting the police don’t deploy robots will seem like insisting every mission to neutralize a terrorist be flown by a manned airplane instead of a drone.
In Dallas in 2016, police used a robot mounted with explosives to take out a sniper who had shot and killed five officers. What would have been more dystopian — more officers getting shot, or a killer robot getting the job done without exposing anyone else to harm?