The legal debate surrounding the development and deployment of autonomous weapons systems (aws) has stagnated in recent years, having arguably hit the hard limits of legal doctrine. At the heart of this impasse lies the focus upon autonomy as both the innovative and defining feature of aws. Thus, the autonomy of the weapons system places it in a legally liminal zone between agent and object, revealing a set of legal problems that revolve around issues of control, influence, responsibility and liability, and questions of legal compliance that follow from the prospect of autonomous lethal decision-making.

This paper seeks to explore alternative framings to the same underlying technology as a means of escaping the limits imposed by the autonomy framework that has dominated the debate to date, and to examine the consequences that flow from pursuing these approaches from legal and regulatory perspectives. In particular, emphasis is placed upon the networks approach, and the systems approach, which this paper sets out and differentiates from the orthodox emphasis upon autonomy. These alternative approaches suggest that the legal problems arising from the autonomy framing are the easiest set of issues to address, insofar as these frame legal problems, while the networks and systems approaches seem to touch upon legal mysteries to which no ready legal or regulatory responses can be made. Rather than dismiss the network and systems approaches, however, this paper suggests that appropriate, adequate and robust legal and regulatory responses must consider the insights and challenges that these approaches pose, and that pursuing these approaches will lead to powerful converging arguments supporting a moratorium on the deployment of aws.

近年来，围绕自动武器系统（aws）的开发和部署的法律辩论停滞不前，可以说已经达到了法律学说的严格限制。这种僵局的核心在于将自主性作为aws的创新和决定性特征。因此，武器系统的自治将其置于代理人与客体之间的法律界限内，揭示了一系列法律问题，围绕着控制，影响，责任和赔偿以及法律遵从问题而产生。自主的致命决策。

本文试图探索对同一基础技术的替代框架，以逃避迄今为止在辩论中占主导地位的自治框架所施加的限制，并从法律和监管的角度研究采用这些方法所产生的后果。特别是，本文着重强调了网络方法和系统方法，并将它们与对自治的正统强调区分开来。这些替代方法表明，从自治框架中产生的法律问题是最容易解决的问题集，只要它们构成法律问题，而网络和系统方法似乎触及法律奥秘，而对于这些奥秘，尚无任何法律或法规对策可以解决。被制造。但是，与其放弃网络和系统方法，AWS。