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Robot wars are so much better than human wars. Against humans, robots will eventually use more non-lethal options (it's easier to be humane if losing a fight me

Robot wars are so much better than human wars. Against humans, robots will eventually use more non-lethal options (it's easier to be humane if losing a fight means replacing a drone than when it's either your life or your enemy's). Then, robots will be mostly used against other robots, reducing death tolls. Then, perhaps, wars will be decided in friendly Starcraft matches, saving billions. :)

madaxe_again 11y ago
Those are some optimistic assumptions. Perhaps the Robots will refuse to fight and will all hold hands and sing kum-bay-ya, eh?
- egor83 11y ago
  This was the premise of some sci-fi novel I read long ago: two countries at war switched to using robots, and as robo-armies became more interconnected and thus more intellectually powerful, they understood the pointlessness of destruction and refused to fight. IIRC they went to pick flowers on the battlefield instead of singing, though. I thought it was one of Stanislaw Lem's novels, but can't find the name now; I might be wrong about that.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    It was by Stanisław Lem; It’s called The First Sally; or The Trap of Gargantius
    - egor83 11y ago
      Yes, this one exactly - thanks!
    - kwhitefoot 11y ago
      Lem wrote some wonderfully whimsical stories; all the more surprising when you consider the times and place in which he wrote. For another perspective on autonomous drones read Robert Sheckley's Watchbird.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    Of course many humans understand war the same way, but are caught in a trap comprised of a mix of game theory and forces beyond their control.
  - madaxe_again 11y ago
    Pretty certain pkd did this too - Robots keep reporting to humans they the surface is still radioactive, etc., human emerges from bunker, all is green, Soviet and American Robots living in peace together. Edit: The Defenders, which became The Penultimate Truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story)
crpatino 11y ago
While there are possibilities for more humane warfare using drone armies, the downsides are way, way worse. By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units. Even worse than that, there is also the well documented history of the Cold War, where nuclear war and MAD was only spared because there were individual low level officers that exercised a humane criteria and knowingly disobeyed protocol. If robots would have been in charge of nuclear defense systems during those years, we probably would not been here discussing this.
- xixi77 11y ago
  "By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units." -- doesn't this suggest that robots (who would not disobey their orders) are likely to be much better than humans at reducing human rights violations?
  - peterwaller 11y ago
    I think you missed this part of the comment: > and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units.
    - xixi77 11y ago
      well reducing them by half wouldn't be a bad thing either :) although of course it's more complicated than that, I just wanted to point out that the direction of the effect is rather unclear at this point.
  - crpatino 11y ago
    It seems to suggest so, but you have to take also into account all the violations that never occur because some honorable human soldier choose to disobey direct orders from their not so honorable superiors. Or the much more extensive and systematic violations that ruthless but pragmatic commanders never order in the first place because they are aware on the effect that would have on the morale of the troops.
Beltiras 11y ago
That's very altruistic. This hypothesis has been tested and rejected. The collateral damage due to drone warfare has increased over time. There is some hope it's slowing down but that might just be lack of data or a slowdown in dronestrikes.
- Retric 11y ago
  UAV's have few realistic less than lethal options without people on the ground. Ground based drones will could actually capture someone which allows for intelligence gathering.
- xixi77 11y ago
  Of course it has increased, there are many more drones out there. The hypothesis is whether drones would do more collateral damage compared to humans tasked with the same job. Also, to my knowledge all current drones are not closed systems, and there is always a human pressing a button, so they aren't even a subject of this article?
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    Right, a human always has a close eye on the drone's operations, so if it were to target something silly like an MSF hospital the human operator can stop the strike! Drones will be deployed in situations where human based intervention would otherwise be a political non-option, thus creating collateral damage where there otherwise would be none. The cold truth is that an algorithm chooses the where (based on automatically collected and analyzed metadata no less!) a machine relays the commands, an interface displays the target coordinates and then the human obeys.
    - xixi77 11y ago
      Or, differently phrased, achieving political objectives that would have otherwise not been feasible. It is not obvious to me that a side relatively more tolerant to own casualties should enjoy the political advantage. Also, do we discount casualties that the intended targets would likely have inflicted, had they not been eliminated? In any case, this article is not about merits of drones per se, just about the self-targeting ones. So when you say that "an algorithm chooses the where" -- any reference for that?
jpt4 11y ago
Between multiple opposed parties attempting to resolve conflict, war is a meta-mechanism that solves the decision making problem vacuously, by removing all but one participant. Until a permanently disabling threshold other than death is found [0], there will exist a price at which it is profitable to undermine any abstraction layer of polite competition. Automated militaries lower the price point at which death, whose limit is genocide, is an economic alternative. [0] Perhaps through cryptographically one-way neurolinguistic re-programming. Even Japan's conditioning by the American occupation (one of the most brutal cultural reorganizes absent enforced diaspora) seems to be waning after 70 years.
- jpt4 11y ago
  Edit: cultural reorganizes -> cultural reorganizations
superuser2 11y ago
EMPs make robot war between states of similar capability pretty unlikely. Robots are only particularly interesting against enemies who can't wield meaningful electronic countermeasures, like protesters and other domestic uprisings. We often mark the fall of a regime at the point where its army and secret police take off their uniforms, climb down from the guard towers, and join the protest crowd (or go home). Robots can remain loyal to the central command structure to the very end. Human police forces are liable to defect if not paid, likely to refuse suicidal engagements, and may even refuse immoral engagements. With good enough engineering, a regime's drones will remain ruthlessly efficient even when it runs out of money, is obviously on the wrong side of history, and is obviously going to lose. I'm not sure whether the final outcomes of revolutions would change, but their endings will certainly be longer and more painful. A Berlin Wall capable of defending itself indefinitely without human intervention would not have fallen so easily.
- alecco 11y ago
  > EMPs make robot war between states of similar capability pretty unlikely Hmm, they can just shield the control modules (cpu and memory). And use optical storage or similar for large amounts of data and basic programming. Also, EMPs usually last only a couple of seconds and can only be effective in a small area. Maybe the robots can just reboot and wait for a valid command a few seconds later by some flying drone.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    EMPs burn out circuits, so equipment can't just be turned back on. Also, not an electrical engineer, but my understanding is that shielding involves grounding, which is relatively difficult for things that fly.
    - Phlarp 11y ago
      Also worth noting that "shielding" electronics is not a binary field-- The damage that occurs depends on both the strength of the magnetic field produced and the specific electronics in question. A strong enough EMP, perhaps one from a coronal mass ejection on the sun, might require a mountain of shielding to adequately protect sensitive electronics. On the flip side, a vacuum tube calculator would be much more resilient than an iphone.
mzs 11y ago
"Maxim was later knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to humanity -- it was thought that the machine gun would make wars shorter, hence more humane." Spencer C. Tucker _A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East vol 6 1st ed_ pg 1198 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughtered-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-f9e068f5148 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughte... "Not even the evidence of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, with its long sieges and trench warfare—an eerie predictor of World War I’s horrors to come—could persuade military observers of the Maxim gun’s lethality on the modern battlefield."
- nickff 11y ago
  Artillery caused ~60% of combat deaths and 75% of combat injuries in World War 1. The machine gun is definitely a terrifying weapon, and has the added impact of being directed at individuals, or aimed at groups, but was simply much less deadly. I would also add that indirect-fire artillery is much more likely to cause post traumatic stress disorder (shell-shock), as the randomness and lack of control is traumatic.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    Not a wargames expert, but you could argue the threat of the machine gun kept people in trenches, which of course shaped the war and made artillery a cornerstone. Kind of like how the queen in chess may not take many pieces. She is easily the most powerful piece, and as a result a very credible threat. As a result she can be used to project threats rather than taking pieces.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Have nuclear weapons succeeded where the machine gun failed?
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> Then, robots will be mostly used against other robots, reducing death tolls. You're thinking like a nice person, which is the wrong approach here. What you should be doing is, think of it as if you were Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Okay? You're Stalin. And now you're thinking "hmmm, how could I use these shiny new toys, I wonder?..." It's not the best case scenario you should worry about, it's the other end of the stick. Security 101. (Unless, of course, your whole post was sarcastic, in which case nevermind.)

madaxe_again 11y ago

Those are some optimistic assumptions. Perhaps the Robots will refuse to fight and will all hold hands and sing kum-bay-ya, eh?

egor83 11y ago
This was the premise of some sci-fi novel I read long ago: two countries at war switched to using robots, and as robo-armies became more interconnected and thus more intellectually powerful, they understood the pointlessness of destruction and refused to fight. IIRC they went to pick flowers on the battlefield instead of singing, though. I thought it was one of Stanislaw Lem's novels, but can't find the name now; I might be wrong about that.
- teddyh 11y ago
  It was by Stanisław Lem; It’s called The First Sally; or The Trap of Gargantius
  - egor83 11y ago
    Yes, this one exactly - thanks!
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    Lem wrote some wonderfully whimsical stories; all the more surprising when you consider the times and place in which he wrote. For another perspective on autonomous drones read Robert Sheckley's Watchbird.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Of course many humans understand war the same way, but are caught in a trap comprised of a mix of game theory and forces beyond their control.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Pretty certain pkd did this too - Robots keep reporting to humans they the surface is still radioactive, etc., human emerges from bunker, all is green, Soviet and American Robots living in peace together. Edit: The Defenders, which became The Penultimate Truth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story)

crpatino 11y ago

While there are possibilities for more humane warfare using drone armies, the downsides are way, way worse. By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units. Even worse than that, there is also the well documented history of the Cold War, where nuclear war and MAD was only spared because there were individual low level officers that exercised a humane criteria and knowingly disobeyed protocol. If robots would have been in charge of nuclear defense systems during those years, we probably would not been here discussing this.

xixi77 11y ago
"By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units." -- doesn't this suggest that robots (who would not disobey their orders) are likely to be much better than humans at reducing human rights violations?
- peterwaller 11y ago
  I think you missed this part of the comment: > and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units.
  - xixi77 11y ago
    well reducing them by half wouldn't be a bad thing either :) although of course it's more complicated than that, I just wanted to point out that the direction of the effect is rather unclear at this point.
- crpatino 11y ago
  It seems to suggest so, but you have to take also into account all the violations that never occur because some honorable human soldier choose to disobey direct orders from their not so honorable superiors. Or the much more extensive and systematic violations that ruthless but pragmatic commanders never order in the first place because they are aware on the effect that would have on the morale of the troops.

Beltiras 11y ago

That's very altruistic. This hypothesis has been tested and rejected. The collateral damage due to drone warfare has increased over time. There is some hope it's slowing down but that might just be lack of data or a slowdown in dronestrikes.

Retric 11y ago
UAV's have few realistic less than lethal options without people on the ground. Ground based drones will could actually capture someone which allows for intelligence gathering.
xixi77 11y ago
Of course it has increased, there are many more drones out there. The hypothesis is whether drones would do more collateral damage compared to humans tasked with the same job. Also, to my knowledge all current drones are not closed systems, and there is always a human pressing a button, so they aren't even a subject of this article?
- Phlarp 11y ago
  Right, a human always has a close eye on the drone's operations, so if it were to target something silly like an MSF hospital the human operator can stop the strike! Drones will be deployed in situations where human based intervention would otherwise be a political non-option, thus creating collateral damage where there otherwise would be none. The cold truth is that an algorithm chooses the where (based on automatically collected and analyzed metadata no less!) a machine relays the commands, an interface displays the target coordinates and then the human obeys.
  - xixi77 11y ago
    Or, differently phrased, achieving political objectives that would have otherwise not been feasible. It is not obvious to me that a side relatively more tolerant to own casualties should enjoy the political advantage. Also, do we discount casualties that the intended targets would likely have inflicted, had they not been eliminated? In any case, this article is not about merits of drones per se, just about the self-targeting ones. So when you say that "an algorithm chooses the where" -- any reference for that?

jpt4 11y ago

Between multiple opposed parties attempting to resolve conflict, war is a meta-mechanism that solves the decision making problem vacuously, by removing all but one participant. Until a permanently disabling threshold other than death is found [0], there will exist a price at which it is profitable to undermine any abstraction layer of polite competition. Automated militaries lower the price point at which death, whose limit is genocide, is an economic alternative. [0] Perhaps through cryptographically one-way neurolinguistic re-programming. Even Japan's conditioning by the American occupation (one of the most brutal cultural reorganizes absent enforced diaspora) seems to be waning after 70 years.

jpt4 11y ago
Edit: cultural reorganizes -> cultural reorganizations

superuser2 11y ago

EMPs make robot war between states of similar capability pretty unlikely. Robots are only particularly interesting against enemies who can't wield meaningful electronic countermeasures, like protesters and other domestic uprisings. We often mark the fall of a regime at the point where its army and secret police take off their uniforms, climb down from the guard towers, and join the protest crowd (or go home). Robots can remain loyal to the central command structure to the very end. Human police forces are liable to defect if not paid, likely to refuse suicidal engagements, and may even refuse immoral engagements. With good enough engineering, a regime's drones will remain ruthlessly efficient even when it runs out of money, is obviously on the wrong side of history, and is obviously going to lose. I'm not sure whether the final outcomes of revolutions would change, but their endings will certainly be longer and more painful. A Berlin Wall capable of defending itself indefinitely without human intervention would not have fallen so easily.

alecco 11y ago
> EMPs make robot war between states of similar capability pretty unlikely Hmm, they can just shield the control modules (cpu and memory). And use optical storage or similar for large amounts of data and basic programming. Also, EMPs usually last only a couple of seconds and can only be effective in a small area. Maybe the robots can just reboot and wait for a valid command a few seconds later by some flying drone.
- superuser2 11y ago
  EMPs burn out circuits, so equipment can't just be turned back on. Also, not an electrical engineer, but my understanding is that shielding involves grounding, which is relatively difficult for things that fly.
  - Phlarp 11y ago
    Also worth noting that "shielding" electronics is not a binary field-- The damage that occurs depends on both the strength of the magnetic field produced and the specific electronics in question. A strong enough EMP, perhaps one from a coronal mass ejection on the sun, might require a mountain of shielding to adequately protect sensitive electronics. On the flip side, a vacuum tube calculator would be much more resilient than an iphone.

mzs 11y ago

"Maxim was later knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to humanity -- it was thought that the machine gun would make wars shorter, hence more humane." Spencer C. Tucker _A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East vol 6 1st ed_ pg 1198 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughtered-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-f9e068f5148 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughte... "Not even the evidence of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, with its long sieges and trench warfare—an eerie predictor of World War I’s horrors to come—could persuade military observers of the Maxim gun’s lethality on the modern battlefield."

nickff 11y ago
Artillery caused ~60% of combat deaths and 75% of combat injuries in World War 1. The machine gun is definitely a terrifying weapon, and has the added impact of being directed at individuals, or aimed at groups, but was simply much less deadly. I would also add that indirect-fire artillery is much more likely to cause post traumatic stress disorder (shell-shock), as the randomness and lack of control is traumatic.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Not a wargames expert, but you could argue the threat of the machine gun kept people in trenches, which of course shaped the war and made artillery a cornerstone. Kind of like how the queen in chess may not take many pieces. She is easily the most powerful piece, and as a result a very credible threat. As a result she can be used to project threats rather than taking pieces.
tedunangst 11y ago
Have nuclear weapons succeeded where the machine gun failed?

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

> Then, robots will be mostly used against other robots, reducing death tolls. You're thinking like a nice person, which is the wrong approach here. What you should be doing is, think of it as if you were Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Okay? You're Stalin. And now you're thinking "hmmm, how could I use these shiny new toys, I wonder?..." It's not the best case scenario you should worry about, it's the other end of the stick. Security 101. (Unless, of course, your whole post was sarcastic, in which case nevermind.)