sure, a landmine is a killbot. a control system with any kind of weapon can kill people

but intelligence is much more important than weapons. you can make sure they don't get away or turn the weapons against you if you can outsmart them. also you can kill the people you intend to kill, instead of somebody else, which is fundamental if you have objectives other than racking up a high body count. finally, intelligence is how you make weapons in the first place

No, a killbot is a way to kill parties while trying to reduce the number of 'false positives', aka collateral damage. But because a killbot does that the result then is that you get far more deployment and eventually the collateral damage in total rises because the weapon is seen as effective. That's why killbots are bad.

that is certainly a very plausible and worrisome risk, and i agree that facial recognition doesn't require strong ai

but i think there are other, possibly larger risks that result from strong ai in weapons, and plausible incentives to put it there

Can you give some examples of those risks?

like biological weapons, its collateral damage might be a lot less predictable, because it's hard to predict what someone who's smarter than you will do

The term you are missing here is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_chain

The thing that does the killing in a military is just a tiny part of the total functionality. As you say it doesn't need to be that smart. Picking the targets and figuring out what is going on without your enemies knowing they are being watched is the much larger part of the kill chain. There is ample room for AGI here.