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For a site with a readership so familiar with "scaling out", I am surprised about takes like that. Does it matter if the technology makes the precision a bit b

For a site with a readership so familiar with "scaling out", I am surprised about takes like that. Does it matter if the technology makes the precision a bit better and the individual person evaluated for being killed, has a little better chance of surviving, thanks to being identified by a machine? When... the machines allow many more people being killed. After all, this is what automation allows us to do. How many qualified and highly trained snipers could the military deploy? Not very many, compared to how many drones and other augmented systems they can deploy now and in the future. Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these.

saulrh 7y ago
> Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these. We already do that. It's just that the computers are squishy, unverifiable, black-boxed wetware that tend to commit war crimes, and the actuators are twitchy pieces of crap that are so bad at shooting that they have to be equipped with machine guns. What do you think soldiers are doing when they get shot at or blown up by insurgents or accidentally shoot reporters or civilians? They're not sitting in their base playing cards, that's for sure.
- jacobush 7y ago
  I know. But that wetware doesn't scale out easily, their families vote at home and so on. Machines are cheap. 100 humans with 15% failure rate will kill a number of people, sure. 100 thousand automatic machines with 5% failure will kill many, many more. Possibly forever, because there will be no need "take our troops home". The troops are already at home, pressing kill/live in their drone baracks.

saulrh 7y ago

> Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these. We already do that. It's just that the computers are squishy, unverifiable, black-boxed wetware that tend to commit war crimes, and the actuators are twitchy pieces of crap that are so bad at shooting that they have to be equipped with machine guns. What do you think soldiers are doing when they get shot at or blown up by insurgents or accidentally shoot reporters or civilians? They're not sitting in their base playing cards, that's for sure.

jacobush 7y ago
I know. But that wetware doesn't scale out easily, their families vote at home and so on. Machines are cheap. 100 humans with 15% failure rate will kill a number of people, sure. 100 thousand automatic machines with 5% failure will kill many, many more. Possibly forever, because there will be no need "take our troops home". The troops are already at home, pressing kill/live in their drone baracks.