Driving the news: On Tuesday, Armenia accepted a cease-fire with its neighbor Azerbaijan to bring a hopeful end to their brief war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

• Azerbaijan dominated the conflict in part thanks to the ability of its fleets of cheap, armed drones to destroy Armenia’s tanks, in what military analyst Malcolm Davis called a “potential game-changer for land warfare.”

An even bigger game-changer would be if such armed drones were made fully autonomous, but for the foreseeable future such fears of “slaughterbots” that could be used to kill with impunity appear overstated, says Michael Horowitz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

• “The overwhelming majority of military investments in AI will not be about lethal autonomous weapons, and indeed none of them may be,” says Horowitz.
• A report released last month by Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology found defense research into AI is focused “not on displacing humans but assisting them in ways that adapt to how humans think and process information,” said Margarita Konaev, the report’s co-author, at an event earlier this week.

Read the full article on Axios Future.