The gap may be huge morally but it's very narrow in practice. The problem is that general purpose includes any purpose, including murder. It's rather different from airborne drones because it can be much stealthier and can simply move into position in advance, wait in silence and strike without warning and like drones it is effectively disposable so there would be very little form of effective defense against such tactics deployed at scale, but qualitative differences like that aren't really the main point we should be concerned about. The point is, we cannot ignore the extreme, profound danger these technologies pose to the protection and continued functioning of human civilization simply because it is not designed for it. It may be too late to stop it completely, but that's absolutely no excuse for leaving it unchecked and allowing it to run rampant.

Nuclear weapons technology never stopped developing, but as humans, we all agreed it was too dangerous to let proliferate freely, and we have kept it in check and so far managed to avoid annihilating ourselves with it. It may not be the greatest success story, but it is the best we've been able to do, and there's no reason not to keep trying, if the alternative is annihilation, and I believe in both cases it is.

Fair point but there’s a huge gap between “this company receives DOD funding” and “these robots are designed to hurt people”.

No there's not, lmao

My worldview that the United States' technology breakthroughs will be used to kill civilians across the globe? Yeah I don't have to worry about being wrong, pretty much ever about that, lol.