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Why did physics departments pivot away from applied and defense work?
During the 50s, 60s, 70s there was pretty intense cross disciplinary work between physics and engineering departments and industry with a focus on the US arms industry. This appears to almost have completely stopped among physic departments and a lot of them have shifted into increasingly esoteric and less applied areas.
What caused this pivot? As a whole it appears only engineering departments are really working on applied areas anymore.

I think it was largely acknowledged in hindsight by prominent physicists of the time that the collaborations were a mistake.

The cold war started shortly after WW-II. The moon/space race then also began (Sputnik - 1957). Doctoral students in STEM fields were able to get full fellowships for doctoral study (as I did). Undergraduates could get very favorable student loans that were forgiven for those that went into teaching (also myself). That all ended in the very early 70's after we beat the "Ruskies" to the moon in 1969. I don't think Physics was special, but it was rocket science for quite a long time.
The academic marketplace also fell apart between 1970 and 1972.
But the arms industry has always lobbied heavily and successfully for government funding.
Additionally, in that same period, the US economy was very good so funds were readily available. Lots of factors.
Why it mostly went away is a different story, but there is a tendency to succumb to the fallacy of the last move. After a seeming win, people think that the "other side" has no more moves, so attention shifts elsewhere. That has been a blunder performed throughout history. After COVID seems to go away we lose focus and forget that another pandemic might easily occur at any time, so medical research starts to lose money...
Same old, same old.

Hmm those makes sense but it also feels like there was a fundamental character shift.

Well, in the US, the administration changes every 4 or 8 years and even when it lasts 8, changes are made in the agencies at the four year mark. There was a lot of turmoil because of Vietnam and the end of the Nixon era.

Makes some sense in regards to administration changes but my overarching feeling is that the academic departments basically turned away from these areas on purpose. It's increasingly hard to find professors who take pride in this work(or are even capable of doing it because of clearance issues). I know a few but it's basically kept secret, not for legal reasons but for social.

I doubt that a lot of federal money for research goes unclaimed. There was a huge cutback. And in the cold war - Vietnam era there were a lot of anti war academics. I think your guess is wrong. I've had to take loyalty oaths to study, actually (late 60's IIRC).

It might even be that the proportion of STEM academics who wouldn't take defense department money was higher around 1965-1970 than now. But lots of things have changed. End of the Soviet era, etc. These things are all connected.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not in physics(which is what my question was on) but for example the AI department where I studied basically rejected a bunch of DoD funding because the only professors who passed the qualifications for it were philosophically opposed to the target application. I was forced to listen to multiple ethics lectures attempting to demonize the areas of weapons development so there's some pretty strong pushes among segments of either administration or academics in this.

The premise is incorrect.  Applied research is widespread in physics departments.
Physics departments do not research radar, aerodynamics, nuclear weapons, and so forth because their involvement in that research is not necessary anymore.  They work on new applied stuff that's more relevant to their capabilities.

I don't think so, looking at the output of the physics departments at the universities I have been in there's a huge gap between what is deemed as "applied physics" and building functional things which was the focus in the past.

Also there's always more to be done on radar, aerodynamics, nuclear...none of the fields are complete in so far as no longer being relevant.

@FourierFlux What are you basing this assessment on? A cursory read of the Wikipedia page on the history of radar, for example, shows that academics were not the ones who developed functional, useful radars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar

@FourierFlux Please note the difference between "research is not necessary anymore" and "their involvement in that research is not necessary anymore".  If it can be done outside a physics department, why do it inside a physics department?   Physics departments have plenty of special expertise which is relevant to application.  It just is different special expertise from decades ago; things from decades ago are no longer special.

I think one can object to the question in many different ways, and here are several:
1. You say "a lot of [departments] have shifted into increasingly esoteric and less applied areas". In some sense, physics has never been about applied research -- the wikipedia definition of physics reads as follows:

Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves.

And that has always been true: Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and nearly every other titan of physics you could name from the time before the 1950s was interested in fundamental questions and not nearly as much in applications. You can call these esoteric, but they go back a very long time -- particle physics as we know it started in the late 1800s after all.
2. There was a time when physics departments shifted to also include research in astronomy, astrophysics, materials sciences, and a number of other disciplines. Then people realized that that is not a great fit given the philosophical origins of physics (as outlined in the quote above) and they split the department. So many universities today have physics departments that investigate, well, physics. And then they have astronomy or astrophysics departments, and they have (typically quite large) materials sciences departments. But nearly every physics department will have a sizable number of people who do fundamental work on the characterization and development of solid state matter, and it's really not very useful to say that that is not applied in some sense: for example, numerous physicists have gotten Nobel prizes for work on lasers, and numerous more for work on materials with specific electric, thermal, magnetic properties or their interaction. When they did this work, it was all about fundamental properties, but it turned out to be very applicable. Nearly every one of your electronic devices around you will have a dozen of these materials built into them somewhere. It would not have happened without solid state physics researchers in physics departments.
3. Many researchers, in many departments, work across disciplines. There continue to be connections between physics departments and engineering departments that turn on the idea that many fundamental properties discovered about matter happen to have practical applications (see above). It is simply not true that the connections between physics departments and engineering departments no longer exist. It may be true that these collaborations today revolve less around national defense topics, but that's because (i) national defense today knows most of what it needs to know about the materials it used (which wasn't the case with nuclear bombs for several decades), (ii) national security in the US today revolves a lot more around making sure that we continue to be technologically superior, and this is furthered by materials sciences more than knowing about the properties of Plutonium that we don't already know to 3 digits of accuracy.
4. It is simply false that departments are not involved in defense research. There continues to be a lot of research about materials that have weapons applications (think, for example, thermal shielding, radiation hardness, ...). A large number of physicists are also involved in experiments such as the National Ignition Facility, which is and has always been primarily a national defense facility built with the goal of investigating ways to build nuclear weapons without actually testing them.

Solid state is definitely the most relevant area most physics departments work on but I don't really agree with the idea that physics was always about fundamental research(though it is moreso today). Again during the time frame I listed you saw physicists actively involved in many more projects focused on developing end products which is no longer the case.

You have always seen physicists involved in applied topics, and you continue to see so. I mean, go back to the physicists in the mid-1800s in Britain who figured out basically all of (theoretical) thermodynamics while also building steam engines. And there were plenty of theorists who looked at quantum field theories in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s -- all of the particle physics standard model was built in these decades. I really do think that you're perceiving patterns where there are none as stark as what you proclaim.

Another factor is that universities tend to be much bigger now than they were in the 1950s.  With size comes more departments.  It's impractical to have 100 departments each with 3 professors, but it's much more practical to have 100 departments each with 10 professors.  This means that, in the 1950s, many universities did not have the array of engineering departments they have today.  Even a large university in the 1950s would have had a civil engineering department and a mechanical engineering department and maybe an electrical engineering department, but they probably didn't have materials science or industrial engineering or any of the other more specialized engineering disciplines.  Moreover, many of the older engineering departments still came from a 19th century way of doing engineering that ignored physics and calculation (even basic Newtonian mechanics) in favor of just testing models until they broke and adding 10% for a safety margin.
As a result, many of the people who would be found in, for example, a materials science department today had to choose between being in a civil engineering department or a physics department, and they found the physics department a better fit.  This means you had people who were considered physicists back then but would be considered engineers now doing applied research.
What's changed is not that physicists stopped doing applied research, but rather that the people doing applied research stopped being called physicists as new names for what they were doing emerged.


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Sex with professor as graduate student
What are the do and do nots with regards to sexual relations between a professor and graduate student?
As long as they aren't your advisor or on your committee is it considered OK?
How does this work?

Dangerous, in many ways, and in any case.

They’re your colleague. You expose yourself to MANY problems by engaging in conduct this way. Particularly if you come from the U.S, Title 9 can crush you.

Maybe check your university’s rulebook. Maybe it is explicitly forbidden?

What are your institutions rules?

I looked at my university website and it doesn't indicate that's in any violation of university policy so long as nothing is coerced.

Looking more closely, as long as the professor isn't in a supervisory role it's considered OK.

This question also has a related discussion.

Is the prof in your department?

Yes, she works on a joint project but she's not an advisor or related to any of my work directly.

How can someone working on a joint project not be related to your work?

There's a global system but her area of expertise is completely separate, it's liking calling the person who designed the seats on a boeing aircraft related to the person who designed the wing.

Did you meet this person in a work context, or is it complete coincidence? If so, they seem to be closer to your work than you are indicating. Someone who is a professor on a team of professors that includes your advisor and that manages the overall project that you are involved in is not someone unrelated to your work.

I’ll address you as the graduate student based on the phrasing of the question, hope I’m not being too presumptuous.
In the US, the professor can’t be your advisor if sexual or romantic relations are taking place. They can’t be on your thesis committee. They can’t be teaching a class you’re taking, can’t be supervising you as a TA, can’t be writing you a letter of recommendation, can’t be in any position of authority over you whatsoever, during the relationship and most probably at any time in the future. If none of those things are an issue and you’re a consenting adult, and barring any specific institutional policy to the contrary, you’re in the clear and are free to behave in any way that any other adult is allowed to.
Keep in mind some people in academia would still feel uncomfortable with the situation and may be critical towards you and/or the professor if they become aware of the relationship. Depending on the details, your and the professor’s professional reputation and career may be at some risk. Sex tends to make people uncomfortable, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.

Some places have much stricter rules than this.

@AnonymousPhysicist that wouldn’t be inconsistent with what I wrote. I’d still like to see examples supporting your claim. And note that it would be very problematic (and potentially legally questionable) for a university to arbitrarily restrict its graduate students’ right to date people of their choice, including from the campus community - any restrictions of this type will have to have some rational basis, and with the lack of a supervisory role or other type of authority differential, I don’t quite see what that basis would be, except perhaps at a private religious institution.

Since this is a duplicate, I do not see a need for further discussion here.  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3142/are-relationships-allowed-between-students-and-faculty

@AnonymousPhysicist thanks for the link. Yes, I think there are other existing questions discussing related things. And yet the post you linked does not support your claim about places with “much stricter rules”. I imagine readers here will accordingly treat your claim with a measure of skepticism.

@DanRominick "the post you linked does not support your claim" False.  Let's not discuss further.

source: Stack Exchange

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Free alternative to kahoot live quizzes?
Is there any free (ideally open-source) alternative to Kahoot for making live quizzes?
I used to like Kahoot for live classroom quizzes, but recently they've changed their pricing model to only allow for classroom sizes of up to 10 students.
PS: LaTeX support would be a great bonus.

Latex support? What would that look like?

It would be nice if the questions and the answers could contain math formulas. E.g. I would like to be able to type "$\in_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x) dx$" in the question editor which should then be displayed as the corresponding formula when playing the quiz. Ideally, the question editor should allow already for showing a preview of the compiled formula.

I too have encountered this problem in my classes. Now I use a https://quizizz.com/join instead of a kahoot. It has ready-made templates for tests in math, physics ... and most importantly you can write a formula using LaTeX! It has a lot of features, for example you can allow students to attach photos with their solutions. If the question is in the form of an open-ended answer, you can set up automatic checking (equivalent math entries will also be marked as correct. There should be full access for teachers, but the basic rate has been enough for me so far.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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How is an engineer's degree viewed among the admission committee for PhD applicants?
How is a 5-year engineer's degree viewed among the admission committee for PhD applicants? How much weight does the name of the degree have in the review process?
Assuming a choice were to be made between an applicant who has an engineer's degree and another who has a master's degree in the same field (supposing the applicants are equal with respect to the other factors: same letters of recommendation, same SOPs,...) would the master's holder be advantaged just by virtue of holding a master's degree? What if the engineer's degree holder had taken courses that would be viewed more favorably with respect to the program they are applying to, would he still be at a disadvantage?
It would be fantastic if applicants and/or admission committee members could share their personal experience with this matter.
EDIT: The applicants hold degrees in Electrical Engineering, and are applying to a PhD in Electrical Engineering. But this doesn't exclude answers from those who were in similar engineering fields (e.g., Mechanical Engineering degree holder applying to a PhD in Mechanical engineering,...)
EDIT2: An engineer's degree is a degree received after usually 5 years of study. It used in some countries in Europe like France.

PhD applicants for what field? Fourteenth Century European History? What?

@Buffy In normal circumstances, I doubt that an engineering degree holder would be able to apply to a PhD in "Fourteenth Century European History" .

Agreed, so what field are you asking about? Theoretical math is different from EE, I suspect.

I want to make the question as inclusive as possible; my field is EE, but the question is not just restricted to EE, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers,... can also share their experience.

So, you are asking how people with engineering degrees are viewed for admission to engineering doctorates?

Not exactly, I am asking about how people with engineering degrees are viewed for admission to regular doctorates, like an electronics engineering degree holder applying for a PhD in electronics (not necessarily to an engineering doctorate).

I suggest that you focus the question more on what you need.

@BryanKrause take a look at this.

I apologize for the confusion made. I just clarified what I meant by engineering degree.

@Hilbert Much better now, thanks.

It's going to be a big old "that depends."
In the case of a very similar undergrad subject to grad subject, as electrical engineering to electrical engineering, the engineering degree will be looked on favorably. Especially if the undergrad school was a high ranked school.
The farther the subjects are apart the less weight the engineering degree will hold. For example, electrical eng. undergrad to computer science PhD is possible, if the undergrad had lots of computer science type classes. And so on. If the undergrad degree had a strong emphasis on courses that are relevant, then it is possible. You will be facing stiff competition, so you would need to have some reason to be picked over more directly relevant students. High marks or relevant work experience or special projects or really good letter of recommendation or some such.
If the subjects are very far apart then you will be facing a very high barrier. Especially if you didn't take a lot of relevant classes.
It is possible to jump specialties. But it's a tough thing to do.
My PhD supervisor did his undergrad in Engineering Science. This is a very unusual degree in that students basically pick a science area, and double up. They must pass all the requirements for the other department, and all the requirements for an engineering degree. My prof did physics. So he got all the core courses for a physics degree, and all the core courses for an engineering degree. And he aced it all.
One of my co-students in my PhD did an undergrad in languages. He could speak five, and write four, including Mandarin and Russian. But he also loaded up on math and physics. So he fit in well in a particle physics PhD.
My prof's prof was John Moffat. Moffat had no undergrad degree. He was living in Paris and making a living as an artist, learning physics in his spare time. Then he wrote Einstein a letter asking him how to solve some tricky problem. Einstein wrote back. After a few exchanges, Einstein asked him why he didn't ask his own prof these questions? And when Moffat explained he was just an artist living in Paris, Einstein got him into Cambridge in the PhD program.
So it's possible. But it takes unusual circumstances. And you need to do a lot of prep work before you go.

(+1) For specific examples of field jumping. A former university faculty colleague of mine got an undergraduate degree in English and later a Ph.D. in math. Another former colleague of mine was at one time a full professor of mathematics at an R1 Doctoral University and currently teaches English at a different R1 Doctoral University. A former classmate got a Ph.D. in physic after an undergraduate degree and some graduate work in classics. (continued)

The very famous physicist Edward Witten majored in history and minored in linguistics (i.e. he didn't even minor in math related area!).

With all due respect, this doesn't really answer the question. The question is not  about a bachelor's degree, but, rather, about an engineer's degree.

@Hilbert: "completing it granted qualifications to further pursue a doctorate." [from the link you gave] I realize your question includes additional information that restricts policy to specific countries/regions, but it's probably helpful for others reading this thread to mention that, in the U.S. (and possibly some other countries), the vast majority of those who pursue a (research) doctorate do so directly after a bachelor's degree, and for virtually every university in the U.S. there are no field-specific degrees required for admission to any given doctoral program.

It would be naive to think that the name of your degree is hugely determinative of your suitability for a doctoral admission. What matters is what you did within the degree and how suitable it is for the next level. An engineering degree might be highly suitable for a degree in applied math. Or not.
What any admissions committee wants to know is how suitable is your preparation for the upcoming work and how likely is it that you will succeed in it. The name of the degree doesn't mean much other than as indicators that sort of suggest what you have done in the past. "Resource Engineering" (is that a thing?) only gives a hint of that.
They will look at the courses you took, especially if there is some change in field. They will look at how you did in the courses they think important, largely ignoring others. They may look for some research and/or writing experience. They will look, in most cases, at your letters of recommendation and at who wrote them. But it is predictors of success that they need to see.
A degree in Mechanical Engineering might not be suitable at all for a doctorate in EE (though I don't know that for sure) while a degree in CS might be more appropriate.


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How to Cite research papers retrieved from a computer software?
There's an offline school software from the computer laboratory which is able to view research paper from the previous students who had graduated. How should I cite it in my reference list using APA 6 Format if I used a paper from the software as my related literature?

Could you please clarify what I found a thesis from a school software that contains all of their previous students research means? (You can edit your question, rather than respond below.)

If I understood correctly, you are using a certain piece of software that allows you to read papers. If this is the case, you can cite the paper just as you would if you had read it via another source (e.g. online, or even the print version). For example, it's not necessary to cite Google Chrome or Adobe Acrobat Reader every time you view a pdf using one of them.

but then if I had it from google I can provide links which in this case I can't since it's from an offline software

Why do you need to provide a link? A citation should include the author's name(s), paper title, venue and date of publication.


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What scale should I use to measure the test results for my research?
I posted this question in the Stack Exchange for Statistics last night and so far, no one has answered yet. Please read and tell me if there's any other tag I can use for my question.
I would like to know what statistical tool I can use for my research. I am a student of Bachelor of Arts in English. I am proposing research topics, which require me to give my respondents grammar and vocabulary tests. Both tests have 25 items and the passing score is 50%. My professor requires me to have a scale for the test results. She said that it is "Any statistical tool that you can use and fits your study."
The topics I'm proposing, which require tests, are the following:
1. A Comparative Analysis of Grammar Competence between "a school I will not name" 12th Grade Students Who Watch Lucifer and Who Don’t Watch English Series to Discern Whether TV Viewing Should Be a Regular Learning Approach
2. A Comparative Analysis between "a school I will not name" 12th Grade Students Who Listen to Songs with Vocabulary Words and Who Only Memorize Meanings to Discern Whether Song Listening Should Be a Regular Learning Approach
3. A Comparative Analysis between "a school I will not name" 12th Grade Students Who Watch Video Clips with Vocabulary Words and Who Only Read Sample Sentences to Discern Whether Video Watching Should Be a Regular Learning Approach
I need to have at least 30 respondents who will answer my multiple-choice grammar and vocabulary test. I need to prove that there is a problem in either grammar or vocabulary in the 12th grade of the school. What scale should I use to measure the results? My professor gave the Likert scale as an example. I just know that this is used to measure the intensity of an answer. Can this be also used to measure test results?
I already have 30 respondents and 12 of them failed the vocabulary test. What statistical tool can be used to show that the problem in vocabulary is significant? The mean, median, and mode scores for the test are a passing score so I can't use any of the three as the tool. I tried using z-score but it only made the number of those who got 50% of the score lower.


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Ethical concerns regarding the review of a paper on autonomous armed drones
I would like your suggestion on a delicate matter involving a paper that I am reviewing. I will avoid giving too many details to preserve anonymity.
In this article the authors describe an algorithm for the (unmanned) control of a military armed drone. The work has been done completely in a simulator, but the authors show clear pictures of the type of real-world military drone they reproduced, explicitly saying that the real drone can be armed with different type of bombs. The performance of the algorithm is scored based on the number of times the simulated drone autonomously hit the target. The authors never discuss possible ethical concerns of this technology, neither they explicitly say if this technology will be used on real drones to hit human targets with possible involvement of civilians (e.g. in counter-terrorism).
My personal position is against the development of lethal autonomous weapons. Even though I have several years of experience in reviewing papers, this is the very first time I have to deal with such a problem and I am not sure how to move. I think that this kind of ethical problems are common in medical-related fields, but rather uncommon in engineering, and that they are catching our community off guard.
Note that, from a formal point of view the situation is fuzzy. Even though there has been an international petition against the development of autonomous weapons, the formalization in an international ban (like the one for chemical weapons) seems to be far away. Moreover, the ethical guidelines of the journal just apply to the use of animal in research, and to experiments on human subjects. This let me conclude that from a formal standpoint the paper is legit since it does not break any rule.
I have considered writing to the editor expressing my concerns or pointing out these concerns directly in the review, so that the authors can give an answer to my queries. As last solution I am also considering the option of withdrawing, but I would prefer to set up a dialogue with the authors and the editor since this is more constructive for everybody. However, I think it is also important to consider the hypothesis that my ethical position can bias my review (even though I am trying to be as neutral as possible) and this may be unfair for the evaluation of the technical quality of the proposed method.
My question is: how should I proceed in the review process? There are a few options: withdraw for ethical concerns, just review the article, review and express my ethical concerns to the editor (and maybe to the authors).

Update: 5 March 2020
Thank you everyone for your answers, they really helped me to better understand the situation. I decided to withdraw as reviewer, and I sent an official letter to the editor. In the letter I expressed my ethical concerns without giving any comment on the technical quality of the paper. The paper did not break any formal rule, therefore recommending an official rejection would have been like imposing my personal ethics over the review process. In the letter I have also reported those sentences that clearly framed the drone like an autonomous lethal weapon.
The assistant editor wrote me saying that the editor liked my academic attitude and wanted me for a second review. The editorial team has contacted the authors, who said they did not wanted to create a misunderstanding and that they are willing to modify the expressions. This seems to imply that they have forwarded to the authors the list of sentences I confidentially reported to the editor, and that the authors want to adjust those sentences in the revised version.
My personal opinion is that just rephrasing the paper without changing the substance would not be enough. You can substitute "target" with "goal" and "attack" with "reach" but that remains an autonomous armed drone.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Is target selection autonomous, or just the attack itself after a human operator selected the target?
I'd say the first one is dangerous, the second is not. There have been guided missiles, cruise missiles, laser/GPS guided bombs, etc. for a long time, and it's better to use those and not carpet bomb the whole area WWII-style.

@Nyos the paper did not discus this particular detail. The target is given, but there is no description of the way it has been acquired. However, note that the distinction between a Lethal Autonomous Weapon (LAW) and a Guided Bomb Unit (GBU) is not made based on the way the target is provided, but on the degree of autonomy of the weapon itself. LAWs have a higher level of autonomy and the ability of autonomous decision making for navigation and attack. The drone described in the paper is clearly a LAW. I invite you to give a look to the page on Wikipedia about LAWs for further details.

@Nyos even that can easily be seen as ethically problematic. Sure, a precision drone strike that just kills the person you want to kill and maybe a few collaterals (objectifying humans here^^) right next to that person (their fault clearly^^) maybe better than carpet bombing the whole village. But then again, maybe not killing anyone is even better. I.e. by providing such precision weapons you may make it more likely that such murders happen at all. So there can be reasons of concern no matter the type of drone/weapon is being considered.

@FrankHopkins but haven't you abstracted it too far in the other direction? Should one refuse to review any research that could potentially be used in any kind of weapon? For instance, would you advocate for refusing to review research on aerodynamics, because drones use wings to fly?

@dwizum I don't find that abstract at all. It's not about hammers or wings, we are still talking about stuff that is primarily a weapon. And I find this categorical statement that one type of weapon is not problematic because it is more surgical very questionable and I find it very reasonable - whether I follow that in every instance or not - that someone considers these weapons as equally or more unethical than wmd. For starters because they make it so easy and thus also remove part of the automatic public control (when you need to send special forces).

@dwizum Btw. with a more general pacifistic view, it is typically easy to argue that any new "better" weapon can be unethical, but that's not even my point. (And no I'm not saying we all should uphold such a pacifistic stance, but I would still understand if some people would want to do so and would find that not less ethical than people having a more pragmatic approach).

@dwizum Consider poisoning a former spy in a foreign country. With just a few collaterals of people who get too close when the poisoning happens. Lot more surgical than sending bombers and more convenient than sending a special ops team. Is development of such a poison ethical? The West certainly doesn't like it. ... when it's done on their turf.^^ What if some bad dictator has such surgical strike drones and he can play "murder-the-opposition" cosily from his gaming chair. As an outspoken citizen I'd prefer him having atomic bombs - at least it'd be less likely he'd use them against me. ;)

Is their research inextricably tied to their current application domain?  That is, can the same research/algorithms be equally useful when applied to a non-controversial use case (like dropping fire-fighting grenades on wildfire hotspots)?  Useful research that's framed against an unethical problem domain likely warrants a different response than research that has no ethical use case.

I wonder if it would be more helpful to split this issue in to your personal ethics and the actual paper. Should a review of a paper take the personal views of the reviewer in to account? If so, then what are we to expect from reviews and publications etc? You do state the difference between the content and the larger ethical world it exists in, but I'm not entirely sure if a paper is 'bad' if it only focuses on its engineering perspective. Maybe a second paper just about the ethics would be more fitting.

@LeopoldBloom I think the real problem is that this type of research is kind of unstoppable. If you convince the journal to reject it, it could be rewritten as happening in a virtual world like a video game which would just thinly veil it anyway. It will still end up in the hands of the people that would want to use it to do exactly what the paper says it should do. If it was currently situated in a virtual world and not applied to a real world context would you reject it because it could be applied to a real world context? It's very difficult to stop 'progress'.

@FrankHopkins it could be rewritten as happening in a virtual world like a video game which would just thinly veil it anyway I don't think we need to could that sentence, because it's already happening. You don't even have to leave Stack Exchange to see the evidence: go hang out in the AI site for a while and watch the number of questions that are basically asking about how to program computer AI to be good at both choosing and then hitting targets.

@dwizum I don't think your last comment was meant for me ;)

@GenericJam I'm not going to stop this instance of A because  some other instance of A will "surely" not be stopped (by another person, because they will cite me as their excuse^^) is a pretty weak excuse not to stop the instance of A you can stop. That being said, the fact that technology can be used in different ways is precisely why ethics is never fully out of the picture. And it's not black and white either. If I could choose to invent a deadly virus able to kill humanity and by not doing so I would only delay its invention by 3 years, I'd still consider that an ethically good decision.

'the authors never discuss possible ethical concerns of this technology' - I guess there wouldn't have been much room left for the rest of the paper if they did!

Yes. Rephrasing the paper is not enough. Explaining that their work is not practical because any weapon controlled by their algorithm is likely to violate the principle of proportionality and hence the laws of war would be enough. As scholars they are obligated to state the limitations of their work. We cannot hope for a ban on autonomous weapons systems, but we can have a treaty which regulates their use. By staying as a reviewer you can force the authors to quote the laws of war and make a small contributions towards this treaty.

@Strawberry agreed that they cannot discuss the topic in their paper and it would be considered a detraction from the main topic. What they could easily do however is reference a respective publication, news articles, separate paper of their own in the related works section in a single sentence or two.

I suggest you withdraw and send a formal letter to the editor expressing your concerns. Cite a larger moral universe than the narrow one covered by the journal's policies. Suggest that the research itself is unethical and recommend, without detailed review, that the paper be rejected.
I've been in a similar but less fraught case. I was shepherd of a paper that crossed a less dangerous boundary. I had repeated contact with the authors and tried, over several communications, to convince them that the actions they were proposing were wrong. I failed to convince them. The paper was rejected. I was actually given an award for my efforts to convince them, even though I failed.
My experience suggests that the people who do this sort of thing are not going to be convinced by a dialog of any kind. They are too invested in it to bother to listen.
Don't wait for "the powers that be" to decide this stuff is immoral and leads to a bad end. If people like reviewers at the bottom of the pyramid don't complain about it, this sort of research will continue and will get implemented. There are too many historical exemplars of this to ignore the consequences.

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The OP is undoubtedly aware that this is a difficult question with some grey areas. It may also be difficult to provide an single objective answer, so I will first highlight some courses of action and then make a personal suggestion.
(1) Reject on grounds of the work being unethical- a reviewer has the moral right to do this. Of course, if there's no supporting legislation or precedent, this can become quite subjective, and the reviewer should be prepared for rebuttal.
(2) Reject on academic grounds- the approach would be to point out that the authors have not done a rigourous job since they haven't dwelt on the possible consequences of such technology, and this is an important part of technology development.
(3) Review the paper on purely academic merits, but in the review, convey explicitly to the editor that this work may have unintended negative consequences, and your review does not consider these.
(4) Scrutinise the journal and see if it publishes articles that are (in the reviewer's opinion) problematic. If so, withdraw from the review AND raise awareness about this journal publicly through media, academic networks and so on. (Write to the journal as well, since that is an expected courtsey.)Without the second action, the first is sterile and almost evading responsibility.
Yes, none of the options are easy, and they involve either inviting backlash or carrying guilt. One must take a decision based on one's fortitude and appetite for criticism. I personally cannot recommend taking the softer way out, so my recommendation would be either (3) or (4) depending on how strongly one feels about the issue.
EDIT:
Following a suggestion in the comments, it may be worth differentiating the background of (3) and (4).
In (3), where one conveys one's apprehensions through a private communication to the editor, the moral burden is placed squarely on the editor/journal. The reviewer has done a purely academic duty and is satisfied with communicating apprehensions privately. There could be some good reasons to adopt this stance- trusting the ethical/moral core of the editor/journal, believing that this grey area should be dealt with within professional confines and not publicly.
In (4), one does not absolve oneself on any moral responsibility, and chooses to tackle ethical concerns personally. This means accepting responsibility not only for backlash, but also for the successful dissemination of the message. It is inherently the more difficult, but more responsible and possibly satisfying approach.

This is a good answer, but it would be improved by elaborating on the difference between conveying warning about the morality of the technology in the review itself vs in private correspondence with the chair.

I agree with @StellaBiderman, this looks like a good and balanced answer. Regarding point (4) I did not find any similar article published in the journal, so I discard this solution. At the moment I opted for option (3), writing a paragraph about my ethical concerns and a detailed technical review.

You can also just recuse yourself from the review process on personal ethical grounds.  Rejecting the paper on ethical grounds is up to the journal to decide - it's not correct to submit a rejection on that basis if the editor is otherwise OK with publishing the content.  You don't have to agree to review it, however.

While I like your presentation of the courses of action, I disapprove of your recommendation. (3) will not do.

the reviewer should be prepared for rebuttal I probably do not understand correctly the word "rebuttal" (not a native English speaker) so what does this mean exactly? If the reviewer says no because ethics there is nothing which can force him to do the review. Do you mean that the editor is going to try to explain that everything is fine, go ahead please?

@WoJ in computer science it is typical for authors to be able to write a response to the reviewers, presenting a counterargument for any concerns raised and clarifying points of misunderstanding. Then the reviewers update their reviews based on the response and a final decision is reached. This response is referred to as a “rebuttal.” In common English, a rebuttal is an argument that counters someone else’s argument.

@StellaBiderman: thank you - I thought that it would be a message from the editor, now I understand that it is the author who provides their response (this is - or at least was when I was doing research-  the same in physics).

If it really troubles you, withdraw from reviewing the paper and tell the editor about the ethical concerns.
If you reject the paper for anything other than academic reasons, you're implicitly imposing your ethics on the authors. Ethical statements that make perfect sense to you might not make sense at all to someone else; the very fact that the authors did the research indicates they don't find autonomous armed drones ethically abhorrent. You could claim that your ethics are "better" than theirs, but that is not certain, and a reasonable person could take the reverse position. If you want nothing to do with the paper for ethical reasons, decline to review it, and let someone who is less troubled by the ethics review it.
That said, you can point out the issue to the journal and make sure they are OK with the ethics. It's possible the journal will agree with you that autonomous armed drones are unethical and will reject the paper without review. If they publish anyway, you can distance yourself from the journal by not reviewing for them and/or publishing with them in the future.

the very fact that the authors did the research indicates they don't find autonomous armed drones ethically abhorrent, or they silenced their inner conscience for the benefit of subject interest, bank statement, social status, peer pressure, or a combination of other such reasons.  It wouldn't be the first time.

True about any number of things that significant numbers of people find abhorrent.  From eating pork to paying income tax.

You may be overthinking this.  A reviewer does not accept or reject a paper.  A reviewer recommends the editor to accept or reject a paper.
If you believe the journal should not want to be involved with weapons research, recommend rejection based on moral grounds.  If the editor thinks moral grounds should not be considered, or believes weapons research is ethical, they may ignore your recommendation.
The difficult decision here lies with the editors¹, not with the reviewers.

¹Coming up with more extreme examples of research that has not directly harmed anyone in the methodology but still has strongly unethical implications is left an an exercise to the reader.

This would give grounds for religious reviewers to recommend rejection of papers that go against their theology. I don't think a reviewer should ever make a recommendation on anything other than the scientific content of a paper.

@Persistence If a reviewer holds the belief that a journal should not want to be involved with abortion research, then it's their right to recommend so.  The editors will very likely disagree and probably not ask this person as a reviewer again.  No harm done.  I do think that "is this research ethical?" is a relevant question for reviewers to consider, the footnote in my answer contains a link as to in what direction I'm thinking when taken to its extreme.

Agree with gerrit. There is a multi-dimensional continuum of morals. This example is definitely in a grey area where reasonable people may disagree, as the answers show. But for an individual reviewer, black or white can be easy choices. The editors are the ones faced with the difficult task of reconciling multiple inputs.

@ScottishTapWater I don't see the issue with a reviewer recommending rejection because a paper goes against their theology, so long as they explain that's why they recommend rejection. The editors are perfectly capable of handling such a recommendation appropriately.

Well they could, but they shouldn't have agreed to review anything they can't be objective about, they've wasted everyone's time

TL, DR: You should just ignore your moral questionings for the purpose of reviewing this paper.

For disclosure: I work in a defense related field.
In summary:

The questioning you may be proposing is probably much more complex and involves more hard-to-draw-lines than you may be thinking.
Any political stance that may be held by the journal would be highly questionable, and also, not up to you to decide on them.
It is out of scope to have an ethical discussion on every such technical paper. Even though codes of ethic should be known and adhered to by all professionals in every field.
As far as established ethical guidelines on this kind of publication exist, none have been breached according to the present question (as you've pointed yourself).
You as a person and human being, have the option to refuse reviewing the paper. But don't expect or bully others into doing the same.

In detail/ranting mode:

Despite this being an engineering paper, you kinda should think about the framework of science in general. "Science" and "ethics" are different things, which intersect within "actions". The paper does not claim to kill people for the purpose of testing, it only talks about simulations, hence, due to the lack of actions, the science part is distinct from the ethics part here, so in my book there is absolutely no ethical concern whatsoever that a reviewer should care about while reviewing the paper (other than fake simulated results, dishonest reports and other stuff applicable even to pure mathematics).
I see a lot of technical challenges within the field of autonomous weapons/drones/cars and so on, and those are fields in which people do active work and develop their careers on, for the good and for the bad.
If you are against the development of autonomous weapons, this is a political stance of yours that (IMHO) should not be endorsed by any scientific journal as an entity. You could check if the journal you that requested your review does have some related policy, but I doubt this is the case. Hence, it is not part of your review task to make political assertions about the papers you review.
Where exactly do you draw the line? Autonomous killing weapons are off to you, but what about face recognition AI? There are also concerns about unregulated development of AI applications, and even proposed temporary bans on usage of this technology. Do you expect every AI journal cease publishing until further notice? Maybe you'd like all weapon performance related publications to cease as well because weapons in general are bad? I get thousands of results from searching "missile efficiency" on google scholar, all in the first pages talking about engineering with no ethical discussion. Should all those papers have been rejected as well?
Would it ease your conscience if the "theme" of the paper was a bit more disguised? Maybe you'd have nothing against a purely mathematical essay on Monte-Carlo methods, but guess what: They trace back to the project of the atomic bomb. Back when I was an undergrad student, I've worked in a project where a simulated drone would take pictures of a target. Oddly, the camera would always break after the first picture was taken. Took me a few minutes to notice it was meant the simulate a bomb. Though it was the only time I've seen this topic be treated with no unaware people being a bit shaken, apparently it was an empathy move on the part of the teacher.
Bluntly, if my (technical/theoretical only) paper was denied due to a reviewer thinking that "this technology should be banned", I'd see this as no different that him/her saying "my religion disagrees with what you are saying". Which did happen in the past, stories tell that Napoleon once questioned Laplace about not dedicating any word to God on one of his treatises. Of course this gets blurred in humanities fields where the contents of a poor publication may translate into explicitly forbidden things like hate speech, fighting words, and so on. There is also a problem in medical/biological sciences where any decent publication needs empirical results (i.e. while I can simulate a drone strike, I can't simulate a poison acting on the human body). But this questioning is not about the scientific merit of the paper.
Also, don't ask the authors to include an ethical discussion on their paper. It's just out of scope, and frankly that's a humanities field of science, not an engineering field. At one hand, I'm completely equipped to write and read the scientific literature about weapon engineering (in the fields I work with), and I did have to take a course on ethics during undergrad school, I am aware and adhere to the codes of ethics applicable to my profession, but I'm a complete noob when it comes to research level ethical/political and legislative sciences. I cannot and should not be demanded to jointly review and discuss the latest literature on the ethics of autonomous weapons and their technical inner workings every time I write about algorithms for weapons. I just do the latter. An exception could be given to adding some standard boilerplate text like "Disclaimer: This paper does not endorse murder". But only only lawyers care about boilerplate text and I'm guessing you are not a lawyer.
Look, I work in a defense related field and know people who work with some products that may eventually (deliberately) kill people. Really, the ethical discussion gets old, you may spend a few days deciding if you are okay with it but once you're done, then discussion is over, just move on and either do the job or refuse it, revisit your values once you feel like it, but not every day (or on every paper for the current example) and don't go around questioning your colleagues about this every chance you get. I'm not minimizing it, companies that develop such products should and generally do have psychologists to support folks who may grow uncomfortable with this situation. And they do ask if the potential employee is okay with working on this kind of product, because this should be given some thought. But these questionings reach conclusions, and insisting on the discussion is just bullying others into adhering to your world view.
While some people have objections about working with weapons (particularly consumer available guns), and do "vote with their feet" by refusing to work in this field, the practicalities of life impose themselves into there existing a very thriving "defense" industry, armed police officers, armed forces and so on. There is just much more votes in favor of weapons existing and being developed than otherwise, like it or not, agree with it or not. And all the more demand for more weapons production and development.

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Academics need to focus on actions and outcomes for this kind of thing. Definitely not a clear cut thing

"...it was an empathy move..." I find such thinly veiled euphemisms funny. It makes you wonder whether the teacher was insulting the intelligence of the students who may have had ethical concerns about the project. Something along the line of 'either you are a true patriot or you're dumb'. Another one of these is the 'defense' category of field, company, etc. which implies that the weapons are intended solely for the defense of the nation, and thus ethically acceptable, when in reality they are far more likely to be used for assaulting other sovereign nations.

I have voted this answer down, because I feel it argues that academics shouldn't concern themselves with ethics, a view with which I disagree strongly.

Ethics should be the base of any human activity. Pragmatism and "objectivism" in science is a threat to humankind.

I find it controversial that someone directly benefiting from arms industry advises an academic to ignore their morale questioning and carry on reviewing of a paper. Note that an academic is not financially compensated for this review, which at least gives them full freedom to follow their morale compass.

@DmitrySavostyanov : I did advise to refuse reviewing the paper, dropping moral questions is for the case the reviewer insists on reviewing. Also note that you are not completely correct in saying that academics are not financially compensated for reviews see answers in this question.

@DmitrySavostyanov Another fact of life is that you can't always live and do business/research completely exempt from conflicts of interest, and while consequences of conflict of interest need to be kept in check, censoring opinions from interested parties is pretty much immoral as well (and often counter-productive).

I appreciate your comments and thoughts. I too have struggled with the concepts of my work. You don't get over those, and you might get desensitized, but seeing death and destruction visited isn't any different. I'd also draw parallels to the utilization of sniper teams for targets. They themselves chose when and where. Stories retold in books left one memory- about a team watching a guy eat lunch, and when he finished they shot him in the head. This is a complex target and our morality and laws haven't caught up with what's possible.

The fact that you may find it difficult to draw a line does not mean that a line cannot be drawn.

@henning--reinstateMonica and even if a line can't be drawn, that doesn't mean you shouldn't act in a case where you feel that the issue is far from the potentially fuzzy boundary. The length of the coastline depends on the scale you use to measure it, but I know it's longer than my foot.

@llama exactly, that's called a slippery slope fallacy. "If we ban murder, we end up banning cars, because people die in traffic."

tl;dr: Show backbone and reject the paper.
@Applied academic presented four courses of actions in their answer; I'm referring to those and you could go read that first (but you don't have to).
My recommendation is:

Start with (4): Check whether the journal is a problematic venue. You might have made a mistake if you've associated yourself with a journal which occasionally legitimizes assassinations and militarized lethal policing using drones, or other similar pursuits.
If it is a problematic journal, just follow through on (4).
If the journal rarely, or never, publishes such work: Do (1). That is, reject the paper (or rather, recommend it be rejected) on ethical grounds. The fact that there are ethical guidelines and accepted bans means you have enough ground to stand on in claiming that such research should not be condoned legitimized and disseminated via the journal. Try to make your argument both on general principle, and - if you have credible information about the specific research you're reviewing - examples of abuse of drone technology by the authors, their institute, their funders or their government. Unfortunately, such examples abound in our world today.

I'm against option (2), because complaining about lack of an "ethics section" suggests implicitly that the paper overall is close to being legitimate. I'm also against option (3), because that means you've "passed the buck" - you've done your part in getting that paper published, and you're now hoping the editor has more backbone than you have. It's doubtful they will, after seeing you've gone along with it.
Note: @DanRomik emphasizes in a comment that a reviewer does not actually reject or accept a paper, but rather recommends acceptance or rejection. That's well worth remembering even if we (and this answer) use the terms "reject" or "accept".

Rejecting a paper on the basis of ethical considerations of this kind is, itself, not ethical.

@puppetsock: 1. By what ethical standard? 2. That journal already supposedly applies ethical considerations, according to OP.

It makes sense to clarify that reviewers don’t reject papers, they only recommend rejection. And if the recommendation is based on a reason the editor finds irrelevant to the task they asked the reviewer to perform, they will simply send the paper to another reviewer. So unless you are suggesting for OP to lie and reject the paper based on spurious, made-up technical grounds, this symbolic protest rejection is no different than simply withdrawing from the review.

@DanRomik: 1. Point taken about who makes the final call (although sometime it's a mechanical formula of reviewer calls). 2. "Unless you are suggesting for OP to lie" <- Have I suggested anything like that? No; so why make such an allusion? 3. It's completely different. An ethical rejection carries with it the threat of further (public) action if it isn't upheld by the editor.

@einpoklum understood, thanks. Yes, both your suggestion and the explanation for it sound reasonable to me.

I do take issue with “show backbone”. This is an aggressive and offensive thing to say, since you are implying that if OP chooses an alternative mode of action then they lack backbone (and so does anybody else reading your answer who disagrees that this is the best thing to do). I suggest that you also “show some backbone” and edit your answer... ;-)

@DanRomik: The implication is there for OP, but not for other readers. OP has indicated he has ethical issues with the paper, but is hesitant to act upon them. So yes, I think that if he lets what I believe he believes are excuses keep him from acting, he will be exhibiting lack of backbone. I'm hoping OP will appreciate this kind of emphatic stance.

@DanRomik that's the first time I've heard that phrase interpreted as "aggressive" or "offensive."

You have a number of viable choices, obviously.  My personal bent is that if you choose to recommend turning the paper down based upon the ethics of weaponized drones that you do it, state that opinion in the review, and get off the stage, refraining from reviewing on scientific matters.
This way your objection is noted, you haven't made yourself part of the bad ethical situation, and you give the editor opportunity to follow the recommendation or seek further review.
The other extreme is to recommend turning the paper down, not saying it's because of ethical reasons, and searching for scientific justification for your recommendation.  I would personally consider this scientific sabotage, and thus recommend against it.
The middle ground is to state your conviction, but offer a fair scientific review.  I believe this is hard to do, and it brings your review into question.  I would refrain from doing this.
Personally, if I had this particular moral conviction, I would simply contact the editor and decline to review the paper, stating why.
Defense industries have driven a whole bunch of technology.  There are those who further this effort.  I can understand refusing to be a part of it, but draw my personal line where it comes to sabotaging the field with disingenuous reviews.  There are ways to have your convictions come through well short of this-- turn down the review, write a letter to the editor for publication, work on the leadership of professional organizations to end the policy of publishing such stuff, recommend to your librarian to discontinue subscriptions, etc.

Summary: ethical concerns come in degrees.

Some are sufficiently standardized in the academic (or even general public) world-wide that violating these standards means the paper should be rejected on ethical grounds.
Other ethical concerns are more personal in the sense that a reviewer may hold them personally, but they are not so widely agreed upon/standardized  the authors should be held responsible to them.
OP should IMHO tolerate that others may have a different point of view for these concerns (2.).
Still, general personal ethical concerns (2.) often include ethical concerns that are widely accepted (1.) but on a narrower scope. These again are on topic for reviewing the paper.

I'd suggest to analyse the (un)ethical points a bit further.
I've never had to do with arms research, but in my field animal experiments are relevant, so I'll use them as an example for which I've considered my personal ethics, and for which I have also encountered other people's ethical considerations.
Here's my point of view:

Is the unethical point something that is "universally"* agreed upon as unethical by academia or even the general public? In other words, is there a current mainstream consensus that says it's unethical, and possibly even standardized formal ethical requirements that are violated? If so, reject on ethical grounds.
Examples would be plagiarism, presenting falsified results or observations or a study design that is considered unethical by the rules ethics committees work on (if there's relevant local variation, I'd judge by the local rules where the authors are).
* I'm after a level of agreement that is stronger/wider than "my professional friends agree with me" and also stronger than "my local community/society" or "my religion says": e.g. my country has stricter laws (which I take as surrogate to ethical agreements) on experiments on humans than some other countries. But these differences do not mean that that other society thinks causing harm to humans is ethically fine, the differences result from nuances in where exactly the line is drawn, how much suffering a particular procedure is judged to cause, how much suffering is thought bearable and how much suffering is considered worth while. So there may be some cases where the judgment differs, but on many cases, the ethical judgment will agree. And that is what I'm after here:
a "current mainstream consensus" (thanks @ObscureOwl) across continents, countries, religions, ....
(I don't think one can claim that every single person agrees on any given ethical point - but asking for such an absolute agreement is pointless for the practical purpose here since it could not be used to determine whether someone's acts are unethical: as soon as they'd disagree, the required agreement could not be reached.)
But I may have ethical objections that result from my (OP's) world-view/philosophy/religion/... and where I'd say while it is perfectly fine  to personally object, but here I (OP) have to tolerate that other people have other points of view.  Here,

a rejection as above is not possible. It would be abuse of power for a reviewer to force their personal opinion onto the authors and therefore unethical.
I may say "I won't be associated in any way with any such research" and refuse being a reviewer.
Unfortunately, this won't do the least in terms of diminishing the unethical research.
Sometimes, digging a bit deeper in why exactly you object to this research can help to arrive at a more constructive solution in that I do the review and in a fair and relevant manner make my concerns heard.

General personal concerns that are expressed on a more detailed level may translate to ethical concerns that are universally agreed upon (on a narrower scope than the more general concern) or sometimes also to scientifically relevant points.

Example from medical research
I once got a paper for review where more than 100 rodents had been used and killed for research. The paper reported proper ethical approval and proper handling (so so far fulfilled the universally agreed upon ethical requirements). They had studied a whole lot of different conditions.
The many different conditions meant that the supgroups in the experiment had only very few animals. While it may be good at the first glance to not make more animals suffer, it really meant that the whole study was worthless because no reliable conclusions could be drawn. This could have been known in advance.
Thus, we have

the scientific concerns of a no proper sample size planning, leading to
the study results being too uncertain to be of any scientific value and this also leads to
the universally agreed upon ethical concern that needless suffering was caused to the animals.

In other words, valid reasons to recommend rejecting the study.

 Application to the paper in question
One obvious difference between this example and the automated arms is that the concerns with animal research are about what has been done already whereas I guess your automated arms concerns are more about future real-life consequences.
Considering as a thought experiment that it is acceptable for you to think about more specialized concerns such as that the proposed technology poses a danger to civilians.
While as you say a ban of automated arms is not (yet) universally agreed upon, AFAIK it is universally agreed upon that civilians should not be put into needless or unnecessarily high danger.
Starting form this narrower but universal ethical concern, I do suspect from your description that there may be several related scientific and engineering concerns with the paper. Which are serious because of the ethical concerns behind them.

The performance of the algorithm is scored based on the number of times the simulated drone autonomously hit the target.

Any such figure of merit can at most be part of the verification and validation of the algorithm.
Valdiation must include estimating and reporting the risk to civilians: if we don't know whether the algorithm leads to unnecessary danger to civilians, we cannot possibly consider it being fit for purpose.
Personally, I'd suspect that moreover there is a trade-off here in that hitting more targets may very well come at the price of also hitting more civilians.
If that is possible, a scoring function that does not penalize hitting civilians may well be considered inherently unsuitable even for development purposes.
I frequently find flawed validation procedures in papers with far less dangerous topics. If the topic is not too important, and the experimental effort to perform a proper validation is out of proportion now, I'm often OK if the resulting limitations are honestly discussed.
The manuscript in questions doesn't even seem to fulfill this much weaker requirement:

The authors never discuss possible ethical concerns of this technology,

(And with such a critical topic I'd tend to insist on proper validation.)

neither they explicitly say if this technology will be used on real drones

... this they may not know.

Universally agreed upon ethics? Was there ever such a thing?

I think "universally agreed upon" is a poor choice of words. Maybe something like "current mainstream consensus"? But I think this answer makes a good point: some ethics are sufficiently "standardized" and formally captured in a policy that you can reject a paper based on them. In this case, the academic consensus appears to be headed in the direction of prohibiting LAWs, but it hasn't happened (yet).

So you can still refuse to review the paper on your own personal ethical grounds. The journal can then  seek a different reviewer if they like. But by taking such a stand you do move the overall ethical discussion a bit in the direction of no longer supporting LAWs research.

@Bex: I added a clarification of what I mean with "universal".

@ObscureOwl: thanks for the suggestion - I like it (though I mainly kept universal as that is shorter). I also added a longer clarification what I mean, which I think is still needed with mainstream in order to make sure that mainstream is not only the local mainstream in OP's closer peer group.

And of course refusing to review is a valid option. But it will at most tell the editor that there is one more reviewer with ethical concerns (iff the rejection form features the possibility to give a reason and that is actually read). The authors will never know this because of blinding, and it would be even more important that the authors  learn about the concerns than that the editor learns about the concerns - after all, it's the authors who conduct the research OP objects to.

In the context of reviewing an article for publication, it is not your job to Save The World. Setting up a dialog with the authors would be to place yourself as arbiter of the actions of a group of people. The editor of the journal should, quite rightly, reject such a plan as part of the review of an article. Though it is just possible such a program might be acceptable outside the context of a review of an article, the journal is by no means obligated to follow such a plan.
You basically have two choices. You can withdraw from review. Or you can give an objective review of the paper based on the content and the publication policies of the journal.
If the journal in question routinely publishes such information, and you cannot accept such items as moral or ethical, then you should inform them, immediately, that you should not be considered for reviewing such articles.
The cure for speech you disagree with is more speech. If you think the work in this article should not have been done, then you should publish your work explaining why. There will be outlets for your positions and arguments. If they are sound arguments based on sound reasoning and valid data, then they will be accepted.

I did not downvote your answer. However, I think some of the reasoning underlying your response remains hidden behind the world "objective." Many will agree that the article should be evaluated objectively, but few can agree on what that really means. Your answer implies that it is obvious that ethics and morality are subjective, non-scientific, sociological considerations, and ought not be a part of the review process. Can you elaborate on what, in your view, are purely objective criteria? Are novelty, significance, clarity, or broad interest?

I did. "... based on the content and the publication policies of the journal."

"The cure for speech you disagree with is more speech." Do you genuinely think that speech is the issue here? The reason I might object to someone going around teaching people how to build weapons has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the fact that people can take that knowledge and build weapons with it. Here the connection is even more direct: the research in question was very likely funded with the specific intent of developing and deploying such weaponry. Also, like AA's comments, your arguments can be easily adapted to ones that oppose IRBs. Do you oppose IRBs?

"... based on the content and the publication policies of the journal." I am asking you what makes certain criteria acceptable to consider and others not. It is not very satisfying say that we will blindly follow the journal's criteria. Academic publishers exist to disseminate research that academics judge to be important, not the other way around.

@StellaBiderman "Speech" is what reviewing a journal article is about.

Read literally, there’s nothing in this answer I disagree with.  But implicitly, it strongly suggests that “an objective review of the paper based on the content and the publication policies of the journal” is incompatible with the idea of raising ethical concerns in the review — which is very arguably is a false dichotomy, since most fields with significant ethical impact consider those ethics an important part of their scientific integrity.  If the answerer didn’t intend this implication, I suggest they clarify that; if they did intend it, I suggest they justify it explicitly.

I never wanted to "Save The World", I just want to do my part of the job. Closing the eyes in front of a problem is not the solution. The fact that a journal does not have a policy for this kind of papers does not mean that the reviewers should not point out their own concerns. Policies are not immutable, they can be adapted when new problems, or new point of views are gathered. Having said that, at the moment I am leaning toward writing an impartial technical review of the paper, while presenting my ethical concerns to both editor and authors.

@richard "Many will agree that the article should be evaluated objectively, but few can agree on what that really means." The standards by which the journal asked papers to be reviewed?

Equating not participating in a review and "closing my eyes" is part of the problem here. I never said you had to ignore the ethical issue. Indeed, I suggested how to approach it. But you should not do that as a journal article reviewer.

I would review the paper and point out that the very practical limitations of the work are not clearly stated.
The ultimate goal of this research is clearly to construct an autonomous weapon system which can function on the battlefield. Now, all warfare is subject to law.
This includes the principle of proportionality.
The principle of proportionality allows for collateral damage and civilian casualties as long as such losses are not excessive compared with the direct military advantage resulting from the attack.
It is clear that the authors have not considered the principle of proportionality, because their scoring algorithm does not consider the value of the military target and has no concept of collateral damage or the loss of civilian life. It follows that any autonomous weapons system controlled using their algorithm will have a high potential for violating the laws of war. Therefore, their research has limited practical value and as scholars they are obligated to state such limitations clearly.
If you step aside, then there is no guarantee that these very practical limitations will be mentioned. More importantly, the readers will not be reminded of the laws of war.
There is a good summary of the legal principles of warfare in this article.
 The main focus is on the principle of proportionality.

To me, the answer is quite simple.
The matter at hand is not considered unethical by a clear majority of the scientific community (if it were there would be rules against it). Consequently, whether or not you consider it to be unethical is of little relevance, your views should not impact the ability of the scientific machine to make progress.
So your choices are withdraw and make no recommendation as to what happens to the paper or to review the paper on its merits and leave the discussions on ethics to their proper forum which is not the review process.

Thank you for you opinion. Your assumption has a logical fallacy, the fact that there are no rules against a specific piece of technology does not imply that the majority of the scientific community considers it ethical. I partially agree with you regarding the second part of the answer.

To be clear, I didn't say it's considered ethical by the majority of the scientific community I said it's not considered unethical by a clear majority... There's a subtle difference there. I'd imagine most people (myself included) are currently on the fence about the issue. The community is certainly not united against the research is my point.

Thank you for the clarification, however the fallacy in the assumption still remains even with the rephrasing. One possible way to know the position of the research community would be a large-scale survey, this cannot be inferred by the fact that there are no rules against something. I agree with you that ethical positions should not influence the rejection/acceptance of a paper (obviously only in the case those concerns are not part of official guidelines).

No, I still disagree... The fact that there are no rules against it is evidence in itself that there is no consensus against it. Otherwise there would be a moratorium.

@Persistence There is no rule to loudly start singing rap songs when meeting for a board game evening, yet in almost all cases I can imagine most participants would not be particularly cool with that. The only thing you can deduce from the non-existence of a rule is that people haven't made the rule yet. From the existence of a rule you can derive that there was enough support to introduce the rule (that doesn't necessarily mean majority either depending on context). But all in all this is a logical one-way street.

@Persistence btw. something can very well be unethical when it is supported by the majority. Genocides are in general unethical, yet the majority of the country they occur in often is in favour or neutral to them. In general, academia is in many aspects a relatively unregulated sub-culture, with relatively little rules and ad-hoc decisions. The higher is the trust in personal ethics and the more reason to be clear about them.


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Kinds of jobs that ex-biologist can apply?
I am in need of some “brainstorming” help/advice for my job search.
Here is a brief re-cap of my situation: a person from Eastern Europe, did a lack-luster Ph.D with zero supervision or mentorship in Germany. Moved to Canada, spend 3 years at the third-rate university as a "research associate/postdoc" (in reality - as a technician, it was only job I was able to secure after a “bad” PhD). I quit my stay at that university, as soon as I could.
Through my grad. school and research associate I've be doing a lot of standard molecular biology jobs: PCR, DNA isolation, cloning, protein/nucleic electrophoresis, blotting, production and purification of recombinant proteins, genetically modified bacteria... anyway, all this hands-on experience belongs to the landfill now.
Have been working as a project manager at another small university (mainly liaising, talking, sitting on meetings, writing documents /emails). Became a Canadian citizen. My job has nothing to do with the Uni, I am employed there because the Uni is a holder of "grant money" for multi-partner project. Genuinely enjoying the job and people interactions, but this is all “soft-money” position, which gives me very little stability and no bargaining chips whatsoever. Besides that, the situation gets "shaky" in terms of project continuation.
I am thinking about embarking on job search again. Just checked NatureJobs - academic job market is pretty anemic in Canada, nothing new. No biotech either.
A Few big negatives:
1)  I have no demonstrable record of academic achievement, bunch of useless middle-author papers and one useless book-chapter;
2)  I've been out of lab for 3 years and no one will hire me do the lab stuff anymore, neither in academia nor in industry R&D
3)   I have never taught any courses to students either (the last PI was all too busy using me as a technician);
4)  I am not a native English speaker, so nobody will hire me as a science writer.
I would love to hear your suggestions as to what jobs I can realistically apply to? I would really like to “brainstorm” though the list of job titles/descriptions.
I am thinking about two regions (1) US – it might be easier to get a job as a Canadian and there is a bigger market out there; (2) Lately I thought of going to SE Asia as "English teacher", but can I possibly aim for something better? I know I will not make it into any decent Korean/Japanese University. What about some places in China? Is it worth it? Are there chances of finding a “lecturer” position somewhere in SE Asia?
Any reasonable suggestions are appreciated!

You have Canadian passport and you want to be only English teacher in South East Asia? I think you should reconsider and apply for possition at uni. Especially with your background. Is uni in Germany where you did PhD accredited?

Yes, it is a legitimate PhD degree in mol.biology with a dissertation available online etc. I don't really want to go into telling about my unfortunate experiences, I try not to despair, but, to tell you the truth, sometimes I want to have some simple mundane boring job which requires minimal brain activity. Maybe, I am undercutting myself... I've looked today at the application procedure at one South Korean Uni - it's plainly ridiculous, they require print outs of all publications, a PhD thesis on a USB stick mailed by a Snail mail. Who does this in 21 century?

Oh yes, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia are also the same, if you will come to SAE you need to know a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense procedures, including school. However, I maybe recommend for you some sort of international demonstration school, or international colleagues or high schools that are private and itnternational. if you dont want academia, salary is also higher

Do you know of any on-line resources where such job ads are posted? Could you kindly recommend any expat or professional community of people, working at those international schools or colleges that you mentioned? Thank you!

I think just google https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1SQJL_enTH865TH865&sxsrf=ALeKk01MTZp_TG6l3UEqKGU93lsYbYKB4w%3A1583298709865&ei=lThfXqqlNMGb9QPKhIOACw&q=international+demonstration+school+high+school&oq=international+demonstration+school+high+school&gs_l=psy-ab.3...16087.18553..18888...1.3..0.128.1683.0j15......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71.my7w5ljQxEE&ved=0ahUKEwjqw7Kph4DoAhXBTX0KHUrCALAQ4dUDCAs&uact=5

I mean you need to search terms as international demonstration school high school, and than go to each  of school website and apply or send inquiry

Thank you! As a person, who went through immigration, through uphill battle in job search, I am really anxious about everything and try to do as much due diligence as humanely possible. Went on Indeed ca today, the job market for anything biology is not bad, it is shockingly bad.

also LinkedIN, it is  really ok situation

"all this hands-on experience belongs to the landfill now.". Absolutely NOT. As of now, every bio lab in my location are looking for people who can do this kind of things. I guess you know what COVID-19 is.

Problem is that OP don't want to be technician or Postdoc. He wants to have tenure job or the job in industry or education. Those are diificult to score in your country @scaaahu if you don't have pedegree

@SSimon: no, I do not want to have a "tenure job"! No way.  If someone if a tenure-track prof, this means endless and persistent search for funding. In reality this means 24/7 grant writing. I really do not have a stamina for this anymore, with all my respect to people who excel in this race. "Postdoc" is beyond me, as I have been out of lab for >3 years.

The truth is that CoVID will go away sooner or later, and what will happen with all those lab. people? In all likelihood they will be laid off.

@user136555 I don't know if CoVID-19 will go away soon or not (I am not bio expert). But, I do know that Taiwan has been trying to develop bio industry, which as you know, requires expertise and experience. So, there are opportunities around here. .

I do hope that the virus goes away soon (rather sooner, than later) and SE Asia recovers swiftly from its impact. I feel sorry for people. Anyhow, thank you for encouragement I appreciate it - I will definitely do my research on Taiwan industries.

@user136555 in my experience Taiwan is out of reach for you. I think you have better luck for US and Canada based corporation, honestly, salaries are lower in Taiwan and they accept people with pedegree

@SSimon Did you mean pedigree? I live close to Academia Sinica. There are a lot of foreign researchers around here. And there is a bio industry park about 5 km distance. In my apartment building campus, there are at least 3 Indians. There are also Americans, Europeans and Vietnameses, etc. The name of the road is "Academia Road".

Google search "Academia road Taipei", you'll find where I live.

How many are on permanent position?

@SSimon: thank you! Let me add my 5 cents. There are two reasons why I do not want to "postdoc": 1) if I don't have a "pedigree" to get a tenure-track, there is no point in dragging it further; 2) I've got off Indeed . You know what is the "salary range" for a postdoc? 32k to 50k Canadian! That's approx. 24K to 37K US dollars. I never heard of anyone who got 50k, though. Usually, its around 40K Canadian. In my opinion, its just "scraping by". Than factor in ~50-60 hr work-week and it gets really ugly.

@SSimon: speaking of Taiwan and other countries. You know what is the problem for people like me? We are "overqualified, but under-experienced". Industry experience beats academic experience any day and every day. One has to make a jump somehow, somewhere to start getting that experience. This is the tough part. I am in the limbo right now. I am not a "postdoc", but a "project manager" at the undergrad teaching uni.

You know, one has to get on a "career track", start building that portfolio of achievements; start crafting a resume instead of academic CV. I got to offer something of value to prospective employer (well, everyone has to). And it very mentally draining to know that there is very little you can actually offer.

@user136555 Taiwan is not for you and SEA you can however work and make a lot of money in an international schools,


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How to spend the last months of a CS postdoc usefully before leaving academia?
My current computer science postdoc ends in the summer. I'm planning to leave academia after that. For the purpose of this question, because reasons I won't go into, we may assume I will never return to academia.
One of the peculiarities of the field of computer science is that research has not really happened if one doesn't travel to present it in a conference over 4 months after the paper has been submitted.
For all relevant conferences that take place before my contract ends, the paper submission deadlines have already passed. Since I don't know what my next job will be or in what continent I'll be living, I cannot commit to traveling to a conference after my contract ends. (And also even if I could, I would not because no matter what people say, I don't want to endorse such a practice.)
I currently have one ongoing project that I've been working on with my advisor. However, it is uncertain how much time is required to finish it. In addition, there are some ongoing projects in our group that I perhaps could join, but I don't know how much I actually could contribute to those projects.
Anyway, I'd like to spend the remaining work time of my contract doing something that's worth doing, when I'm at work working. It seems that there are no good solutions in my situation. But certainly many CS postdocs have had a similar problem before. Is there a solution to this that I'm missing?

Why don't you send your work to a journal instead of a conference? I know that conferences are important in CS, but there also seem to exist good journals in all subfields of CS.

@lighthousekeeper My advisor (that is, my boss who ultimately decides what I do and don't do at work) does not agree with that sentiment.

Do you have a job lined up for after the postdoc? If not, finding one should probably be your highest priority.

@DanRomik I'm talking about things to do at work that I'm paid for. Exercising and keeping in contact with my family and friends are my highest priorities, but that does not matter here. This question is about my current work.

Since it is CS, if there is some code involved in your work that may be used by others in the future, now would be the ideal moment to do all the cleaning up, refactoring and documenting. The documenting part of course also extends to other things you have done regularly, e.g. teaching or bureaucracy.

Perhaps your advisor has one or more students that could benefit from more mentoring than the advisor can supply?
Helping young graduate students learning to do research and write papers would be worth doing in its own right. If you are going on to an industry career mentoring junior programmers would be a valuable skill. It would be a different sort of experience to put on your resume when job hunting, not just more of the same.

That in general sounds like a good idea. However, in my specific case the students in our group have much more experience in this field and perform much better than I have, so I don't think there's anything I can do to help them.

Your contract runs out and you want to leave academia but you still want to do something useful for your advisor. That is very honorable and Patricia Shanahan's answer has a good idea for that. But even if you don't do anything that your advisor finds useful, not a lot of bad can come from it (assuming you don't need recommendation letters, but academic letters are rarely needed in industry).
So go job hunting and polish your CV. Do some online courses or study some material that seems useful for your industry career. Slack off for a bit if you feel you need it.
You should set things up for a smooth transition for your advisors group, so make sure the other group members can continue your projects where appropriate. Beyond that it is ok if you don't produce any more ground breaking research in your last few weeks.

That is indeed an interesting approach. However, I doubt it's good for my mental health to spend 6 months being paid for someone who would constantly complain that the only reason they're wasting their grant money on me is that it's too hard to legally fire me.

One of the peculiarities of the field of computer science is that research has not really happened if one doesn't travel to present it in a conference over 4 months after the paper has been submitted.

This is not true.
What is true is that if a researcher writes a paper, publishes it and then immediately afterwards leaves academia without doing anything to promote the work, then unless the research is obviously important/of very high quality, it will likely go unnoticed and will end up having little to no impact on the field. In that sense, it is as if the research “has not really happened”. But the point is that this is (almost) equally true for papers presented at a conference as for papers published in a different format. Conferences are of course important in computer science, but your logic of “there are papers I can write, but the conference deadlines have all passed. Oh well, I guess I’ll go find something else to do with my time” doesn’t add up.

Anyway, I'd like to spend the remaining work time of my contract doing something that's worth doing, when I'm at work working. [...]. Is there a solution to this that I'm missing?

If you have good ideas for research papers, involving research that you are excited about and think have value for the research community, the best thing that you can do is to write those papers and publish them - online, in a journal, or any other venue that it’s practical to publish in. This is the main “work duty” of a research postdoc.
Now, if you don’t have research ideas, or at least good ideas that you are excited about and think have value for your research community,  then some alternatives to consider are teaching, mentoring, outreach, or developing software that might benefit our supervisor or other researchers. But I also wonder why you are staying on until the summer in the first place. A postdoc who doesn’t want to do research is probably not producing the maximal utility/happiness either for themselves or for their sponsor. The best thing to do may be to find another job as soon as you can and move on to a more fruitful/fulfilling employment situation.
Good luck!

My boss needs publications for future grants. He does not do journal publications. The research does not matter if it does not result in a conference publication, and he does not want to pay me for such research.

"The best thing to do may be to find another job as soon as you can and move on to a more fruitful/fulfilling employment situation." It might be a surprise to you, but they don't exactly sell fulfilling jobs at the nearest supermarket.

@throwawaypostdoc I said “as soon as you can”. Of course it will not happen overnight. That is why my advice is to focus on the job search and improving your employability prospects.

@throwaway everything about the situation you’re describing suggests a toxic and unhealthy work situation. No postdoc does research because their boss “pays them” to do it. So again, I think you’re simply asking the wrong question. You shouldn’t be asking “how can I please my boss for a few more months?” You should ask instead “what is the best thing for me to do right now?” The answer is, find another job ASAP, and in the meantime keep working on whatever research you find interesting and worthwhile and promoting your research agenda through publishing, regardless of what your boss wants.

I agree that the situation sounds toxic and unhealthy, but I don't quite understand how finding another job would solve the problem of having to do what the one who's paying me wants. Many people work in jobs where they have to do things that their boss wants, I don't understand why people treat jobs in a university as something that's necessarily completely different.

@throwawaypostdoc well, when you find a job you can presumably resign and switch over immediately to that job. As for what the sponsor wants: why don’t you ask them what they want you to do? Unless they give you specific instructions, I would assume you are free to spend the time however you see fit.

They tell me to come up with a plan, and if I present a plan that is not good enough, they tell me to do something else. So far their suggestion has been to for me to promise to travel to a conference after my contract ends, which I can't do. I want to come up with a plan that would be good enough for them and enjoyable for me, so I would not have to quit before having an offer from my next job.

(That's why I also don't particularly like these off-topic answers that seem to be so common in SE. Yes, they're often good points in general, but I asked a specific question here because I want answers to that specific question. I can get general career advice and help for my mental health elsewhere. If the question is not good, then flag it, vote it down, or suggest improvements in a comment.)

@throwawaypostdoc that sounds terrible. Run for your life. That’s all the advice I can think of.

I've got a few suggestions, some of which have been noted already.

Document your work. Make it easy for other people to pick up where you left off. This is especially true for coding projects. You also want to make sure that any logistical responsibilities you handled are ready to be handed-off as well.
Assist someone else. Just because you can't go to a conference doesn't mean no one can. Perhaps there are tasks you can do to strengthen a paper a grad student is working on; there may be something time-intensive or disinteresting to the grad student that could get you authorship. You could also consider mentoring undergraduate students in the work you're doing; if you let them take the lead on the research, they can take the lead when submitting.
Promote your existing work. Make your code and data open-source (if your advisor allows) and easy to understand. Set up or strengthen the web presence of your work. Reach out to people at your University involved with publicizing the research going on in your lab/department/college/etc. and find out what that process is like. Look for other opportunities to promote your work, like giving talks at a department, that might be specific to your situation.
Just keep researching. Perhaps not directly applicable to the OP, but others might consider continuing on with research they don't intend to publish for the sake of whoever picks up the project in the future.