nsa and cia can’t whack large number of americans without some risk of mutiny from the soldiers. ai based large scale precision strike does give them both the capability and excuse to do so. what’s easier, to ask 100k soldiers to kill 2-3 people each and feel no guilt or a dozen narcissistic psychopaths to kill 10k people each and feel godlike ? its not really rocket science just track their cell and do a missile/drone strike at the location with basic face detection. they don’t care for few false-positives. its not like any of the targets will be living near oligarchs palace or mega-yacht

you are right the lavender is far from skynet but it lets the israeli scums say that they are not indiscriminately killing innocents but based on petabytes of data analysed by microsoft. and you can’t punish ai for mistakes. bombing kids collecting water or destroying a dialysis center, oopsie sorry the ai hallucinated, we will ask trump for a multi-billion refund to buy more bombs for proper testing.

there is plenty of work going on autonomous front but its solely focused on means to kill the peasants who try to inconvenience the oligarchs. take a look at palmers anduril industries. there are other such companies based in the confederate states.