6 ms·

Humanity has repeatedly proven that it is capable of extreme, systematic cruelty without high-tech gadgets (take the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, for exam

by adwn 5y ago

Humanity has repeatedly proven that it is capable of extreme, systematic cruelty without high-tech gadgets (take the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, for example). Why do you think that autonomous drones would make this worse? "Now imagine an angry mob chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution." This isn't any less frightning, in my opinion.

blfr 5y ago
Holocaust was so striking to contemporaries, despite genocide being fairly common in history, at least in part because of its technological efficiency. Technology also allows for more leverage. Hitler need an entire modern nation state with millions of people, semi-autonomous robots may give this power to a group of thousands.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  No,to produce them you need thousands. To control them you need one- or even none. You could program a ethereum smart-contract virus, which hires people to scam money, produce slaughterbots, ship them to a city and strategically hit the soft underbelly aka airports, roads and railways and communication. If you stack the attack into waves and have the slaughterbot parcels piled into flats by gig workers, you can have a ideology free terror attack that kills millions. Such ATTAC-CELLs without members, are part of my games lore. Here is a picture of a standardized factory, made from standardized components, making "slaughterbots" made from standardized components. https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=10806 https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1... https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=10974 https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1... PS: The main building block is a sort of hangrenadesized fuel-container, with a fuelcell useable fuel that can be chemically primed to be a explosive. A standardized battery that could be exploded would do too..
- DeWilde 5y ago
  Not really, Genghis and the other khans killed more than Hitler using a fairly simple technique: divide the captives by the number of your soldiers and each soldier is tasked with killing the captives assigned to them. They usually had around 100k soldiers, armed with bows and knives, and killed tens of millions. My point is, you don't need technology to achieve bad things and it is the wrong thing we are focusing on when trying to prevent these things. Nukes can already annihilate billions yet here we are, not being annihilated by nukes.
freeflight 5y ago
The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without high-tech". Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized innovation. As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do. The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on whole population scales [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [1] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
- ajuc 5y ago
  Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of people to kill for political reason (for example university professors, priests, politicians, army officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their ethnicity). Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win. There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right? According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc. In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population. The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
jdasdf 5y ago
>Why do you think that autonomous drones would make this worse? Because it reduces the costs of doing it.
- adwn 5y ago
  It doesn't really. Take the Rwandan genocide, they used machetes and guns. Or lynch mobs: All you need is some rope, and maybe pitch forks.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    People overestimate the cost of bullets and underestimate the cost of advanced military weapons (drones in this case).
  - jdasdf 5y ago
    There are more costs than just monetary costs. Convincing people to kill their neighbors is also expensive.
K0balt 5y ago
The difference is in speed and profile . A decision can be made for automated systems to depopulate a region using low profile weapons vs say, nukes. Within 24 hours the job is complete and not a single non-victim actor had to witness the events. Compared to conventional methods which may take years, and risk the losing support, drone swarm ethnic cleansing would be cheap, quick, and decisive. Impersonal and rapid like nukes but without the implications.

by adwn 5y ago

blfr 5y ago

Holocaust was so striking to contemporaries, despite genocide being fairly common in history, at least in part because of its technological efficiency. Technology also allows for more leverage. Hitler need an entire modern nation state with millions of people, semi-autonomous robots may give this power to a group of thousands.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OneTimePetes 5y ago
No,to produce them you need thousands. To control them you need one- or even none. You could program a ethereum smart-contract virus, which hires people to scam money, produce slaughterbots, ship them to a city and strategically hit the soft underbelly aka airports, roads and railways and communication. If you stack the attack into waves and have the slaughterbot parcels piled into flats by gig workers, you can have a ideology free terror attack that kills millions. Such ATTAC-CELLs without members, are part of my games lore. Here is a picture of a standardized factory, made from standardized components, making "slaughterbots" made from standardized components. https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=10806 https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1... https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=10974 https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1... PS: The main building block is a sort of hangrenadesized fuel-container, with a fuelcell useable fuel that can be chemically primed to be a explosive. A standardized battery that could be exploded would do too..
DeWilde 5y ago
Not really, Genghis and the other khans killed more than Hitler using a fairly simple technique: divide the captives by the number of your soldiers and each soldier is tasked with killing the captives assigned to them. They usually had around 100k soldiers, armed with bows and knives, and killed tens of millions. My point is, you don't need technology to achieve bad things and it is the wrong thing we are focusing on when trying to prevent these things. Nukes can already annihilate billions yet here we are, not being annihilated by nukes.

freeflight 5y ago

The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without high-tech". Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized innovation. As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do. The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on whole population scales [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [1] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html

ajuc 5y ago
Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of people to kill for political reason (for example university professors, priests, politicians, army officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their ethnicity). Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win. There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right? According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc. In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population. The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

jdasdf 5y ago

>Why do you think that autonomous drones would make this worse? Because it reduces the costs of doing it.

adwn 5y ago
It doesn't really. Take the Rwandan genocide, they used machetes and guns. Or lynch mobs: All you need is some rope, and maybe pitch forks.
- imtringued 5y ago
  People overestimate the cost of bullets and underestimate the cost of advanced military weapons (drones in this case).
- jdasdf 5y ago
  There are more costs than just monetary costs. Convincing people to kill their neighbors is also expensive.

K0balt 5y ago

The difference is in speed and profile . A decision can be made for automated systems to depopulate a region using low profile weapons vs say, nukes. Within 24 hours the job is complete and not a single non-victim actor had to witness the events. Compared to conventional methods which may take years, and risk the losing support, drone swarm ethnic cleansing would be cheap, quick, and decisive. Impersonal and rapid like nukes but without the implications.