The transfer of responsibility for decisions and actions from humans to machines presents difficult problems for all those concerned with new concepts, their development and use. This book gives practical help by discussing the issues in the context of product design, and gives a methodology to solve them.

Tony Gillespie is a Visiting Professor at University College London and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

His career includes research, technical management in industry, and technical support on large UK government procurement programmes. He now acts as a technical advisor, including to the United Nations meetings discussing potential bans on lethal autonomous weapon systems.

• Chapter 1: The art of the acceptable, not the art of the possible


• Chapter 2: Decision-making


• Chapter 3: Automated control and autonomy


• Chapter 4: Operational analysis to systems engineering


• Chapter 5: Engineering design process


• Chapter 6: Ethics, civil law and engineering


• Chapter 7: Introduction to military legal context and its relevance to engineering


• Chapter 8: Targeting


• Chapter 9: Influences on future military autonomous systems


• Chapter 10: Systems engineering applied to International Humanitarian Law (IHL)


• Chapter 11: Systems engineering for a new military system


• Chapter 12: Making military capabilities autonomous


• Chapter 13: Design of civilian autonomous systems using military methodologies


• Chapter 14: Final considerations for ethical autonomous systems


• Appendix 1: Red Cross Guide to Article 36 Reviews