World War III

Fact-checking could have been much tighter. Loss of contact with Minuteman silos does not mean that someone could have remotely fired the missiles. Stuxnet didn't slow down centrifuges, it sped them up until they were self-damaging. Fuel-cycle equipment isn't in itself weaponry.

Nor is it clear why, for example, you say that autonomous weapons will only be used against military targets. I first wrote about this subject a dozen years ago, and even then the political as opposed to military consequences of robot infantry were quite clear.

But I think the primary route to improvement here is to clarify the central idea motivating the essay. Your "conclusion" isn't really a conclusion because the idea from which you began isn't sufficiently explicit. The premises are ones that, by and large, your essay succeeds in making clear: Tools of warfare, large and small, are gaining intelligence as most "things" are gaining intelligence. The risks of accidental warfare, including perhaps nuclear war, have risen (although at the moment most human beings would probably say that it is old-fashioned human frailty, rather than technological change, that is moving the hands of the clock closer to midnight). Autonomous weaponry eliminates important political limits on the use of state violence. On those premises, what is your additional idea that you want to communicate to the reader? Put it at the top of the draft, in a sentence or two, so the reader knows what you want her to understand. Then you can develop the idea in the context of the valuable material you have in this draft, tightened somewhat. That would enable a real conclusion, that is, a re-presentation of your original idea in a form that the reader can take further for herself, under her own intellectual steam.