I wouldn’t say things like proximity triggers or primitive homing tech like heat seekers are autonomous. Heat seekers don’t adapt to changing situations, but follow a completely mechanical “go towards the warmest spot” path. Being autonomous would mean the could react to the “warmest spot” either disappearing or moving in an unphysical way (suddenly appearing somewhere it’s shouldn’t be, as can happen with e.g. flares).
Basically, if the weapon has a single thing it can do (move towards hot thing), and no way of adapting if that thing doesn’t work as expected, I have a hard time calling it autonomous.
I wouldn’t call a simple robot-vacuum autonomous either for that matter. If the instruction set is “go forward until you hit an obstacle, then rotate 15 degrees clockwise and repeat”, I don’t really see that as “adapting to changing circumstances”.
I wouldn’t say things like proximity triggers or primitive homing tech like heat seekers are autonomous. Heat seekers don’t adapt to changing situations, but follow a completely mechanical “go towards the warmest spot” path. Being autonomous would mean the could react to the “warmest spot” either disappearing or moving in an unphysical way (suddenly appearing somewhere it’s shouldn’t be, as can happen with e.g. flares).
Basically, if the weapon has a single thing it can do (move towards hot thing), and no way of adapting if that thing doesn’t work as expected, I have a hard time calling it autonomous.
I wouldn’t call a simple robot-vacuum autonomous either for that matter. If the instruction set is “go forward until you hit an obstacle, then rotate 15 degrees clockwise and repeat”, I don’t really see that as “adapting to changing circumstances”.