The search for the ultimate weapon has always motivated military planners and engineers to exploit for military purposes new scientific discoveries and technological advances, thereby causing qualitative arms races. The breadth and pace of development in computers, networks, robotics and artificial intelligence suggests the emergence of new generations of weapons, in cyberspace and in the physical world, that will be compact, unmanned and, perhaps, with independent decision-making capability. Could the speed of action-reaction in future conflicts require to put humans "out-of-the-loop"? This conclusion would be quite dangerous, because autonomous weapon systems, in cyber and real space, will inevitably be prone to serious hardware limitations and unreliability, design and programming errors, deception, tampering or, simply, hacking. This ISODARCO Course aims at understanding modern autonomous weapons technology as well as the possibilities and prospects of related arms control limitations.

Nadia Arbatova, IMEMO, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; Peter Asaro, The  New School, New York, NY, USA; Pietro Batacchi, Rivista Italiana Difesa, Chiavari, Italy; Geier Carsten, Cyber Policy Coordination Staff, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, Germany; Oleg Demidov, PIR Center, Moscow, Russia; Sarah Kreps, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; Steven Miller, Belfer Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Wolfgang Rudischhauser, WMD Non-Proliferation Centre, NATO, Brussels1; Frank Sauer, Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany; Luca Simoncini, Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Italy; Gian Piero Siroli, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna, Italy; Michael Sulmeyer, Cyber Security Project, Belfer Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Guglielmo Tamburrini, University of Naples "Federico II", Italy; Steve Wright, Leeds Beckett University, UK.