That's fine for the military, how does that protect joe random citizens?

While Joe random citizen may have illusion of grandeur, they probably are not important enough to be targeted by an advanced drone attack.

If someone really wants a hit on joe random citizen, why would they choose one of these drones over the traditional method? Much harder for a weaponized drone hit to look accidental.

Joe random citizen has a much harder life in places at the wrong end of USA's, Russia's, Turkey's, Israel's, China's, and others' interests, countries who can afford to deploy such technology at scale or have a propensity for projecting their power.

> why would they choose one of these drones over the traditional method

Why does anyone use automation or AI for anything? To have dozens or even hundreds of drones constantly in the air with close to no supervision from drone operators. When you're going after an enemy false positives and collateral damage matter very little, if at all.

> Much harder for a weaponized drone hit to look accidental

Nobody bothers making deaths look accidental in the places these drones will be used. If reality showed anything it's that they barely bother to argue when they bomb schools and hospitals beyond the boilerplate "we're fighting terrorism".

This kind of tech makes a bad situation even worse for many people in some parts of the world. But you'll start worrying about it only if/when someone decides to use it somewhere in a civilized country, closer to home. I'm sure so many people will suddenly find plenty of arguments against the autonomous killing machines then.

USS The Latest will have all the countermeasures it needs. What about $random_middle_eastern_wedding_guests? Countermeasures aren't available to anyone but the military. But in some parts of the word everybody can be a target, especially if some superpower needs to maintain its sphere of influence, or they happen to be at war with some genocidal regime.

Drones have been used quite successfully for many decades now and clearly haven't developed any countermeasures for what most of their targets are concerned, "quickly" or otherwise. This is why we still read about drones bombing people out of existence, whether the correct target or not.

An autonomous drone just outsources the usual killing from the human operator to a script, making it even more likely to make a mistake and also apply the desired effect: terror.