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What's scary is how much this comment reminds me of Reddit...

• nazgulnarsil 19y ago
  I understand, i'm usually against conspiracy theory bullshit myself. using robots on the battlefield is the only subject I get a little spooked over.
  • astine 19y ago
    Robots on the battlefield doesn't spook me at all. It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives.
    • SwellJoe 19y ago
      "It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives." So, who are the robots fighting then if not people? I'm just thinking what a frightening thing it would be for an empire builder like GWB to have a conscience-less army of mechanical killers. At least our armed forces generally want to avoid killing innocents. Big Dogs with M50 machine guns don't care about such fine distinctions. So, yes, it could be scary. Now, of course, as soon as these are available to the general public, I fully intend to exercise my second amendment right to own robotic death machines. That's in the constitution, right?
      • gills 19y ago
        Because maybe, just MAYBE, when we realize our robots are fighting their robots and it's really just an expensive video game, we'll quit fighting and actually sit down and talk. That is, if the robots don't join forces and turn on us first. oops..spelling edit.
        • motley_fool 19y ago
          Nonsense. People don't sit down and talk when they have less to lose. They negotiate when they have more to lose. So what will actually happen is that these ultra-tech tools will just further shield voters from the nastiness of war, and allow their leaders to visit horror on those less technologically advanced. What I'd like to see happen is the creation of some kind of independent news agency that uses UAV and robot technologies to bring back uncensored, uninvited news back from warzones. Of course if this were truly effective, that news agency itself would become a target.
    • motley_fool 19y ago
      This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield. The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries. No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non-combatants experience is the return of their dead or wounded troops. On the other hand, the host country feels the full horror of war. So, frankly, I don't care nearly as much about the volunteers who are sent to risk their lives as the civilian non-volunteers who are necessarily and inevitably harmed. This is not a U.S. specific thing. It's just that as citizens of the top military power, Americans are spared the full horrors of war, yet have the ability to visit those horrors on others. There is a reason why Europeans are not nearly as accepting of warfare.
      • astine 19y ago
        The reason Europeans are not as accepting of warfare is because they screwed themselves over twice with it. War is always the last resort of negotiation. When nations become too belligerent or stubborn conflict will always follow. Europe forgot this lesson twice in as many generations and suffered the consequences. There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make sure you are always ready for a conflict. If you fail to do the first, others may see no choice but to fight you. If you fail to do the second, they may not see any downside to it. This boils down to one principle, you must always back every one of your demands, even the reasonable one which you have a right to, with sufficient force. In short, there is nothing wrong with using machines to do our fighting for us. There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.
        • motley_fool 19y ago
          > There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job. You're assuming that these two issues are independent. I'm proposing that handing our rulers robot warriors will result in harder-to-expose killing of civilians and more unnecessary invasions. Of course, if all the killer robots were working for me, I would deploy them wisely and reduce civilians deaths.
• angstrom 19y ago
  On a long enough timeline every discussion on the Internet converges on Hitler and Nazis.
• euccastro 19y ago
  To be honest, I'm quite tired of all this "ugh, this is so reddit!" I wish people would discuss the (de)merits of comments in their own terms.
  • 1gor 19y ago
    OK. I'll explain why it reminds me of reddit. The author of the comment in question uses tired populist cliché (elites) and tries to impose their own political views on the reader (you think blackwater is bad). Which is likely to generate a long, heated and shallow political debate rather than a discussion about the technology (or about the social implications of the technology).
    • rms 19y ago
      Blackwater being bad is not a political view; it is close to moral truth. I have talked to multiple US soldiers back from Iraq who have described Blackwater committing what would normally be war crimes. However, Blackwater is not subject to laws, so they're not war crimes.
      • rms 19y ago
        Details of one of the incidents: Soldier was in the Air Force, in northern Iraq near the Iranian border. They had a warrant to raid a house looking for a weapons cache. They did the raid with some guys from Blackwater. When they got inside, there was a guy laying on the couch watching TV. Normally, anyone inside a house during a raid would be put in flexcuffs. A guy from Blackwater just shot him, while he was laying on the couch.