36 2 CHAPTER 2 Above, autonomy is described from an engineering perspective, but it can also be viewed from a human value perspective. For instance, in Bioethics, which describes the values that are important as guiding principles in the medical field, autonomy is defined as acting intentionally without controlling influences that would mitigate against a voluntary act (Beauchamp and Walters, 1999). The definition of autonomy in the field of AI should be kept distinct from the definition of human autonomy and its moral value, because they do not represent the same constructs. Although autonomy is an important human value which will be useful in the next section, it is less relevant from an engineering perspective to interpret autonomy as a singular construct for a technical system, because weapon systems may comprise of different levels of autonomy. But even in the case of a “fully Autonomous Weapon System”, ‘[…] that, without human intervention, selects and engages targets matching certain predefined criteria, following a human decision to deploy the weapon on the understanding that an attack, once launched, cannot be stopped by human intervention.’ (AIV & CAVV, 2015; Broeks et al., 2021) the type of autonomy can at most be executive autonomy, because a human will set its goals and the weapon will not decide on its goals or deployment itself. Also, the context will constrain the autonomy of a “fully Autonomous Weapon System” as autonomous systems are created with task goals and boundary conditions (Bradshaw, Hoffman, Woods, & Johnson, 2013). In case of Autonomous Weapon Systems, the context might include physical limitations to the area of operations, for example the presence, or lack of, civilians in the land, sea, cyber, air or space domain. In the next section, several definitions of Autonomous Weapons Systems will be provided and the rationale for choosing the definition of the AIV and CAVV (2015) mentioned above is given. 2.4 AUTONOMOUS WEAPON SYSTEMS Although the societal and academic debate on Autonomous Weapon Systems has drawn a lot of attention in the recent years, we found that the topic was not well delineated in the academic literature. We start this subsection with an overview of the many different definitions and present two classifications of Autonomous Weapon Systems to conclude this section. Definition Autonomous Weapon Systems are an emerging technology and there is still no internationally agreed upon definition (AIV & CAVV, 2015; Sayler, 2021). Even consensus if Autonomous Weapon Systems should be defined at all is lacking. Although some scholars provide definitions in their writings (see Table 3 in appendix C), others caution against such a specification. NATO states that: ‘Attempting to create definitions for “autonomous systems” should be avoided, because by definition, machines cannot be autonomous in
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