> good facial recognition exists

Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them. Though, on second thought, governements don't really care about civilian casualties anyway... Perhaps this is a pragmatic solution to lowering those counts....

>Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them.

Why you'd say that? Major countries (not some rogue states or teams) bomb groups of civilians all the time, often missing their actual target, or killing 10-40 people in the process (even at weddings). It's not like anybody cares outside of the country of those killed.

And of course the "assymetric threat" (read: islamic terrorists) don't just not care about this, they're actually boasting about it online and in videos that they don't care about that. Even in cases where they accidentally hit their own.

So I'd add that it depends on ideology, and very few actors seem to be "above" collateral damage, and no-one cares. Or at least, not enough.

There are also intermediate steps before outright attacks: simply having drones which can track people in a crowd, guide ground forces, etc. has a lot of applications which wouldn’t be publicized (“officer smith recognized the resistance officer in the crowd and followed them home”). Plant some DL fakes on their phone and occupation could be very different.

I imagine pulling the human element out of the loop is valuable to the military.