Institutional language for autonomous weapons was designed to manage public anxiety — 'Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems', 'Collaborative Combat Aircraft', 'Lethality Automated Systems' are all phrases that describe the same capability while placing maximum distance between that capability and the two words the public reaches for instinctively. That strategy is now visibly failing. Futurism's 2019 headline — which included both the official Pentagon name and 'killer robots' in the same sentence separated by the word 'definitely' — was not editorial mischief. It was a precise documentation of the gap that…