Autonomous weapons are on the way. They are going to radically change the way wars are fought >>
A weapon is autonomous if makes its own decisions.
This is not as straightforward as it sounds. Although many of the weapons we use today are smart, they don't make their own decisions. They are simply following the instructions of the human beings that made them. For example: when a precision guided munition (PGM) is fired at a target, it simply follows the complex instructions it was given (relentlessly, Terminator style) until it finds its target.
In contrast, an autonomous weapon develops its own way of solving problems. Currently, cognitive systems can accomplish this by mining big data sets, interacting with simulations and through real world exercise. This should sound familiar. Think for a moment about how you learned to throw and catch a ball. You didn't need a formal education to learn this or knowledge of physics or math to do it. You learned to do it by doing it -- through experience. These new weapons can do the same thing. Like human beings, they can learn to do something new by doing it.
A weapon is autonomous if it makes its own decisions with cognitive capability that is built through experience (learning, training, experiments, exercise, etc.) .