The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, an international forum that focuses on lethal autonomous systems, is hosted twice a year at the United Nations in Geneva. When Branka Marijan attended in November 2017, she thought the five-day sessions - which dealt largely in hypotheticals, speculating on a world where warfare was fought with killer robots - would be business as usual. After all, this was technology some thought might never be developed, and likely never deployed. That year, she quickly realized, was different. That distant, imagined future was suddenly closer and realer than ever.
On the first day, some attendees watched a …