6 ms·

Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race

114 points by OstiaAntica 15y ago

brd 15y ago
I think the scariest part of this drone trend is the opportunity to wage war without losing human life. This shift in risk will dramatically reduce the barrier to starting a war and will further reinforce the power of those already on top.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. If we could have war without losing any lives, that sounds cool—stick in some cameras and we'd happily pay to watch.
  - Eliezer 15y ago
    Yeah, the horror of war without lost life is something I think the survivors of, oh, say, the Hundred Years War, would call (in the modern parlance) a First World Problem.
    - baltcode 15y ago
      But lives ARE lost, aren't they?
    - Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
      War is becoming much safer. The world is too. Fascinating article on it here. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker However I'd love to see any evidence showing drones keep deaths down in war. Maybe in the future, but right now they make life very unsafe in places like Pakistan, which given it's allied to America is bizarre. Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to Boltcode.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    >The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. I have no problem with this part. When you're in a war, having the other side doing all the dying is what you're striving for. The decision to go to war is a weighty thing, but once made you don't hold back.
    - spacemanaki 15y ago
      "The decision to go to war is a weighty thing" Made weighty in large part by the risk to your soldiers' lives. Drones make the decision a less-weighty one, which is a problem, I think.
      - tsotha 15y ago
        No, not really. Drones aren't any more effective than precision air power. How many people did NATO lose in Serbia or Libya?
        spacemanaki 15y ago
        That's a pretty good point but are there no situations where drones are used instead of "boots on the ground"? For instance, would the US use "precision air power" instead of drones against targets in Pakistan, if we didn't have drones? I really have no idea though, I can't even pretend to be informed on this.
        tsotha 15y ago
        What drones give you cheaply is persistence. Let's say you identify this week's Al Queda #2. You know where he is, but he lives in a compound with 20 other people. Drones are slow, use little fuel, and you can swap out the people flying them, so (depending on the model) a single drone can loiter over the guy's compound for up to 24 hours. You watch him until there aren't any innocent people around, then you shoot a missile. All this can be done with manned aircraft, it's just a bit more expensive because you have to refuel them every four to six hours and the pilot will eventually be too tired to continue. The real change isn't automation, but rather the targeting pods that allow you to see what's happening on the ground from miles away at 10,000 feet and precision weapons (like laser-guided bombs and missiles) that allow you to hit exactly what you intend to hit. Whether the aircraft is manned or not manned really doesn't change anything from the perspective of capability. It just changes the cost. None of this is a substitute for boots on the ground - the conflict in Afghanistan would have over years ago if we could put soldiers in Pakistan. There's just no substitute for having a guy on the ground with a rifle when it comes to enforcing your national will.
  - ars 15y ago
    Read Kiln People by David Brin. They make short lived clones of themself (including memory), then the clones fight a full war. The winner of the war gets to do whatever it was they were fighting about, and no real people get killed. It's a full spectator sport in the book, and the combatants enjoy it too - they have special helpers (will full battlefield immunity by both sides) who collect the recently dead to upload their memory back into the host (i.e. real human).
    - 0x12 15y ago
      > and no real people get killed. That's a matter of definition. If a clone is created (assuming for the moment that is possible) with full memory then the clone is a person, and therefore real people. The fact that in that book they have defined such people as 'not real people' conveniently bypasses the fact that they actually are, they're just not originals. See Bladerunner.
      - Confusion 15y ago
        I find it rather ironical that you oppose an implicit philosophical position from some book by explaining another philosophical position, solely supported by another book.
        0x12 15y ago
        That's not just supported 'by another book' but it matches what I feel about how we should treat clones. After all, if a clone is identical you'd have to come up with some pretty contorted reasoning to argue that they are 'not people'. Also, as long as we're not able to actually do this we are bound to find our examples in fiction rather than in real life. How people think about such issues can be revealing, even if it is mostly theoretical. But you could make a case for dolphins or primates being 'people' without too much effort.
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        15y ago
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  The mission for a drone loaded up with missiles is to kill people, not to get into some chess match with your enemy's drones.
  - shabble 15y ago
    It's theoretically possible (although definitely implausible) that drone/remote warfare will play out on the economic battlefield, rather than the human one. In the same way that the space race was an economic proxy of the Cold War, and fairly successfully bankrupted and toppled the USSR. If you play drone vs drone, eventually someone is going to run out of drones, and the means and funds to build more - they are the de-facto losers. It'll be nigh-impossible to keep this contained though, when the enemy realises that for a modest loss of their drones, they can take out your C&C bases or level your munition factories. One of the most recent Culture novels by Iain M Banks -- Surface Detail -- explores in part a similar issue, where two factions agree to settle their differences in a virtual-reality war simulation, but those losing decide to escalate it into the physical realm.
guelo 15y ago
Obama's job as president was to temper the fantasies of the generals and the CIA. He failed. The future lawless robot wars will be scary.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  I think that future was coming regardless of anything he could do as commander in chief. There is no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
  - guelo 15y ago
    Obama didn't have to authorize targeted assassinations far away from any battlefield.
    - nekitamo 15y ago
      In this war, there is no battlefield.
      - CamperBob 15y ago
        More like, on this battlefield there is no war.
      - JonnieCache 15y ago
        Surely, as commander in chief, one of his responsibilities is managing the scope of "this war?" But let's not get into politics...
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - guelo 15y ago
        That's the problem with these robots. The USA has now set the precedent that the robots can go anywhere in the world and blow anyone up that we label a terrorist. This is dangerous and stupid. Of course it was Bush that invented the endless war (how do we win this war? are we supposed to to kill every young muslim that hates us?), but Bush preferred kidnapping people and sticking them in secret prisons, Obama prefers using robots to assassinate from afar, no messy legal challenges that way. We have a monopoly on the robots now but they are only going to get cheaper in the future and everybody will have them, they will present a threat to all establishments. It is stupid for the USA to be going off on our "might makes right" arrogance destroying all international laws and norms. And for what? Do these dirt poor guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan really pose a threat to us? No they don't. The only solution in the future will be for everyone to come together to ban these machines, similar to the treaties against land mines and chemical weapons, but the U.S. will have no moral authority to do so. This future is not very far away.
epoxyhockey 15y ago
I'm going to take an optimistic stance on this topic and say that war technology evolves; we shouldn't be scared of it just because it was sci-fi 10 years ago. I think the development of the nuclear bomb was more scary than some line-manufactured drones. Yes, Obama has been awfully militant lately. He may have thought that it was the best thing he could do in an attempt to get positive approval ratings from the general public. Killing an American citizen w/o trial may have gone too far, even for middle America. The drone arms race is going to be an economical one. And, given the state of the world economy, no country is going to spend billions of dollars on a drone war anytime soon.
- njharman 15y ago
  Drones are far cheaper then other options. I'm taking a pessimistic view. When the costs of war are externalized (as they are now and will be even more so with drones and robots) we no lose the incentives to not have war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
  - winestock 15y ago
    "It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee Fighting war with robots resembles video games. Everyone associates video games with fun. Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it. One of the reasons why the co-op portion of Portal 2 uses robots as player characters is that the designers knew that these characters would die frequently. In order to keep the E10+ rating and in order to quell any outrage, the designers used robots that are not even vaguely human in shape aside from the fact that they are bipedal. TVtropes calls the effect "Slapstick Sociopathy."
    - epoxyhockey 15y ago
      I disagree. Nuclear bombs are a "drop and forget" kind of munition. Killing people with drones is similar in that your side doesn't face much danger. But, once you show a picture of a city completely destroyed and skin melting off of the bodies of your enemies, the general public will determine that war is terrible.
jonmc12 15y ago
I always thought it would be cool if a company built a big bird's nest tower in cities that would host a bunch of flying drones. Then, consumers could rent the video-capture drones online to fly over approved areas, upon which the drones would return to nest for re-fueling. Think maybe you could subsidize the cost (possibly even make a profit) with the video data, or by streaming some feeds for the population to watch. Though have no idea of feasibility (FAA, equipment, real estate), I do like the idea of eyes in the sky for consumer benefit. Maybe something like this could be used for defense - giving population more awareness of airspace.
- brd 15y ago
  UAVs are currently not allowed to be flown by commercial entities in US airspace. If/when that changes it will be fascinating to watch the variety of startups that crop up to take advantage of it.
  - rdtsc 15y ago
    However individuals can fly RC planes. What about companies making RC planes? Are they allowed to test fly them? Set one of those planes up with a deadly payload (use your imagination here) and you have a UAV...
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  No nest needed, here's a sophisticated RC plane flying over NYC with no issue: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/how-a-rc-airplane-buzzed-the-statue-of-liberty-with-no-arrests.ars http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/how-a-rc-airplane...
- ippisl 15y ago
  This technology would also work great for nature movies and nature flight trips. Imagine you could rent rent an UAV , travel in Africa , from your home or a place with a giant screen , follow the great elephants crossing a river as if you were there.
  - 15y ago
Game_Ender 15y ago
An area this article does not go into is how the increased use of robotics in the military could cause the military to classify large swaths of it as controlled weapons research. This would limit the ability of researchers and companies to publish or even work in that area.
- shabble 15y ago
  People like the GRASP[1] guys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM are probably somewhere pretty high on that list. They still need to solve the location sensing issues though - having high-precision calibrated wall mounted sensors aren't really practical for ad-hoc use. I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy use. [1] https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/ https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/
mathattack 15y ago
Everything we do that duhumanizes war comes with good ethical concerns (less loss of human life) but this doesn't make war any better. Drones - save our lives. Cruise missiles - save our lives. An A-bomb saved our lives. Not getting into as many wars would save the most lives. (Note: Some wars - like WW II are I admit unavoidable, but very few fall under this heading)
- OstiaAntica 15y ago
  World War II wasn't unavoidable. If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed. Specifically, the unsustainable reparations on Germany, and the French decision to occupy the German coal regions in the 1920s, destabilized the German economy and destroyed the Weimar Republic.
  - billswift 15y ago
    Actually, the French/UK and German powers were pretty much evenly balanced. Woodrow Wilson's meddling in the war and especially in the "peace conference" afterward was the major factors that led to World War Two. And on the Japanese front, it was the economic embargo by the US, as a punitive measure for Japan's attacks on China, that triggered Pearl Harbor. That may actually have been more or less inevitable, the Japanese military had too much influence in their society at that time and were seriously out of touch with reality.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    Most bad things are avoidable if you are able to predict the future.
  - spindritf 15y ago
    > If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed. And if it wasn't for Appeasement, if the western powers made good on their promises (especially the Anglo-Polish military alliance), Hitler could have been defeated before Germans managed to set the whole continent on fire; and if the French didn't put so much trust in the Maginot Line...
jebblue 15y ago
There was a Star Trek TV episode where two cities fought each other using computers. No spoilers on how it ended.
ars 15y ago
"If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say?" What difference does it make if they used a drone or did it the traditional way? An attack is an attack it makes no difference how you do it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- wladimir 15y ago
  When there are more and more nations with drones, it will be harder to trace them back to some nation-state. And with technology-only attacks there is no longer necessarily a nation-state with army behind it at all. Just an organization with a lot of capital. China could deny being involved. Or maybe the drones were infected with a computer virus (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004)
astrofinch 15y ago
>“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.” How about the fact that we're doing it, period? http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...
- Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
  And no less scary, 15-40% of the time a civilian is hit instead of the correct target. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker And given the dubious right of the CIA to hit there intended target in the first place, the acceptance of UAV strikes is disturbing to me.
grandalf 15y ago
Imagine when drones the size of dragonflies carry needles containing poison to assassination targets. Today's drones are very crude in comparison. Once it becomes plausible that any squirrel, mouse, dragon fly, etc. could be an assassination weapon, it will become necessary for heads of state to travel surrounded by swarms of friendly robots, in all sorts of form factors.
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  I'll let you in on a little secret: Heads of states are generally not assassination targets by other country states. Why? If you were a country, would you like to deal with a decentralized/unofficial government that has no control over its citizens?
  - 0x12 15y ago
    You're obviously not related to Hugo Chavez ;) Travel does not have to mean 'travel outside the country', so even if most attempts to decapitate a country are home-grown that doesn't mean that heads of state don't travel with a security entourage when they are within their own borders. On top of that I do believe that heads of state already travel with a security entourage when traveling abroad. It is not necessarily the other nations they're afraid of but their lunatics. And a small robot drone will be within the financial means of anybody with an axe to grind in the fairly near future.
  - randomStuff 15y ago
    You clearly don't watch enough action movies. The historical record of virtually all attempts on a US presidents life being the result single individual acting alone, have no relevance. :P
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Sometimes the goal of military action is not conquest. Well timed assassinations are hugely powerful (by foreign and domestic groups). One look at the presidential motorcade (or at the entourage of machine gun carrying thugs that accompany politicians in 3rd world countries) should make that quite clear.
alexhawket 15y ago
I'm more interested in the day when there are so many drones, they spend more time fighting each other and forget about the humans all together. We may never even see them, dogfighting above the clouds, save for a the perpetual flutter of broken parts falling from the heavens. Another possibility.. cities protected by phalanxes of model rocket sized guided missiles scanning perpetually for enemy drones.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  That's nonsensical. The chances of drone armies being so perfectly matched they always fight to a stalemate are basically zero. Ultimately one side will win, and then it will have a free hand. It's no different than a conventional air war in that regard.
  - meric 15y ago
    It will have a free hand but then the other side will immediately surrender. Hopefully.
0x12 15y ago
Just like we have a moratorium on the use of chemical weapons we ought to have one on drones. Not that it would ever be ratified. There is something seriously wrong with the level of detachment drones afford the actors on any battlefield. Taking a life should be something done with a large level of reluctance and with the 'taker' risking his own through physical presence. Once that balance is lost it becomes all too easy to resort to violence at a much earlier stage of a conflict. This is all about reducing the barrier to entry for war and that's a very dangerous thing.
- smackay 15y ago
  I agree, but I think that threshold was crossed with the invention of the bow and arrow.
- rdtsc 15y ago
  Drone + neurotoxic chemicals = a deadly & cheap weapon?
  - 0x12 15y ago
    Remind me to stay on your good side.
ck2 15y ago
And the race to make a working emp generator begins.
- 0x12 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compres...
padobson 15y ago
What I'm waiting for is this technology to be open to business and consumer solutions. I dream of a world where Amazon implements drone technology into their SOA fulfillment centers and makes it possible for orders to be delivered in hours or minutes instead of days. Imagine being a high school kid and having a job targeting drop zones for Amazon packages as drones make their final approaches. It'd be a heck of a lot cooler then driving a brown UPS truck.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I was tweeting the other day that we now live in a world where the president of the United States can, without judicial review, assassinate with robots an American Citizen living abroad because of their speech and influence on terrorists. Sounded crazy -- "death by robots" -- but that's about where we are (I don't differentiate between remote-operated vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles because it's not germane) We can't and won't torture a guy we pick up with a rocket launcher in his hand getting ready to kill us, but we can push a button and whack somebody who hangs out with really bad people. Don't forget collateral damage. And we call this morality. Telemetry and robotics are going to change the world in wildly dramatic ways over the next 50 years. Places like HN are where somewhat knowledgeable people can kick around these ideas now, before everybody and his NGO have their own killer robots.
- dantheman 15y ago
  We should never torture anyone for any reason, period. Including that in your statement above makes it sound like your endorse torture, I hope that you do not. We should also never, kill anyone who isn't a direct threat (e.g. on the battle field, shooting a cops/civilians, etc) regardless of where they are and whether or not they're US civilians. The assassination of OBL falls under the same idea, he should have been captured and tried by a jury.
- adamjernst 15y ago
  "Hangs out with really bad people"? Please. You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him. When someone is active on the battlefield, and there's no way to physically capture him, what do you expect?
  - wvoq 15y ago
    > You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him. Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient. Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial. So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and no one bats an eyelash.

114 points by OstiaAntica 15y ago

brd 15y ago

I think the scariest part of this drone trend is the opportunity to wage war without losing human life. This shift in risk will dramatically reduce the barrier to starting a war and will further reinforce the power of those already on top.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. If we could have war without losing any lives, that sounds cool—stick in some cameras and we'd happily pay to watch.
- Eliezer 15y ago
  Yeah, the horror of war without lost life is something I think the survivors of, oh, say, the Hundred Years War, would call (in the modern parlance) a First World Problem.
  - baltcode 15y ago
    But lives ARE lost, aren't they?
  - Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
    War is becoming much safer. The world is too. Fascinating article on it here. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker However I'd love to see any evidence showing drones keep deaths down in war. Maybe in the future, but right now they make life very unsafe in places like Pakistan, which given it's allied to America is bizarre. Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to Boltcode.
- tsotha 15y ago
  >The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. I have no problem with this part. When you're in a war, having the other side doing all the dying is what you're striving for. The decision to go to war is a weighty thing, but once made you don't hold back.
  - spacemanaki 15y ago
    "The decision to go to war is a weighty thing" Made weighty in large part by the risk to your soldiers' lives. Drones make the decision a less-weighty one, which is a problem, I think.
    - tsotha 15y ago
      No, not really. Drones aren't any more effective than precision air power. How many people did NATO lose in Serbia or Libya?
      - spacemanaki 15y ago
        That's a pretty good point but are there no situations where drones are used instead of "boots on the ground"? For instance, would the US use "precision air power" instead of drones against targets in Pakistan, if we didn't have drones? I really have no idea though, I can't even pretend to be informed on this.
        tsotha 15y ago
        What drones give you cheaply is persistence. Let's say you identify this week's Al Queda #2. You know where he is, but he lives in a compound with 20 other people. Drones are slow, use little fuel, and you can swap out the people flying them, so (depending on the model) a single drone can loiter over the guy's compound for up to 24 hours. You watch him until there aren't any innocent people around, then you shoot a missile. All this can be done with manned aircraft, it's just a bit more expensive because you have to refuel them every four to six hours and the pilot will eventually be too tired to continue. The real change isn't automation, but rather the targeting pods that allow you to see what's happening on the ground from miles away at 10,000 feet and precision weapons (like laser-guided bombs and missiles) that allow you to hit exactly what you intend to hit. Whether the aircraft is manned or not manned really doesn't change anything from the perspective of capability. It just changes the cost. None of this is a substitute for boots on the ground - the conflict in Afghanistan would have over years ago if we could put soldiers in Pakistan. There's just no substitute for having a guy on the ground with a rifle when it comes to enforcing your national will.
- ars 15y ago
  Read Kiln People by David Brin. They make short lived clones of themself (including memory), then the clones fight a full war. The winner of the war gets to do whatever it was they were fighting about, and no real people get killed. It's a full spectator sport in the book, and the combatants enjoy it too - they have special helpers (will full battlefield immunity by both sides) who collect the recently dead to upload their memory back into the host (i.e. real human).
  - 0x12 15y ago
    > and no real people get killed. That's a matter of definition. If a clone is created (assuming for the moment that is possible) with full memory then the clone is a person, and therefore real people. The fact that in that book they have defined such people as 'not real people' conveniently bypasses the fact that they actually are, they're just not originals. See Bladerunner.
    - Confusion 15y ago
      I find it rather ironical that you oppose an implicit philosophical position from some book by explaining another philosophical position, solely supported by another book.
      - 0x12 15y ago
        That's not just supported 'by another book' but it matches what I feel about how we should treat clones. After all, if a clone is identical you'd have to come up with some pretty contorted reasoning to argue that they are 'not people'. Also, as long as we're not able to actually do this we are bound to find our examples in fiction rather than in real life. How people think about such issues can be revealing, even if it is mostly theoretical. But you could make a case for dolphins or primates being 'people' without too much effort.
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        15y ago
epoxyhockey 15y ago
The mission for a drone loaded up with missiles is to kill people, not to get into some chess match with your enemy's drones.
- shabble 15y ago
  It's theoretically possible (although definitely implausible) that drone/remote warfare will play out on the economic battlefield, rather than the human one. In the same way that the space race was an economic proxy of the Cold War, and fairly successfully bankrupted and toppled the USSR. If you play drone vs drone, eventually someone is going to run out of drones, and the means and funds to build more - they are the de-facto losers. It'll be nigh-impossible to keep this contained though, when the enemy realises that for a modest loss of their drones, they can take out your C&C bases or level your munition factories. One of the most recent Culture novels by Iain M Banks -- Surface Detail -- explores in part a similar issue, where two factions agree to settle their differences in a virtual-reality war simulation, but those losing decide to escalate it into the physical realm.

guelo 15y ago

Obama's job as president was to temper the fantasies of the generals and the CIA. He failed. The future lawless robot wars will be scary.

brown9-2 15y ago
I think that future was coming regardless of anything he could do as commander in chief. There is no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
- guelo 15y ago
  Obama didn't have to authorize targeted assassinations far away from any battlefield.
  - nekitamo 15y ago
    In this war, there is no battlefield.
    - CamperBob 15y ago
      More like, on this battlefield there is no war.
    - JonnieCache 15y ago
      Surely, as commander in chief, one of his responsibilities is managing the scope of "this war?" But let's not get into politics...
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - guelo 15y ago
      That's the problem with these robots. The USA has now set the precedent that the robots can go anywhere in the world and blow anyone up that we label a terrorist. This is dangerous and stupid. Of course it was Bush that invented the endless war (how do we win this war? are we supposed to to kill every young muslim that hates us?), but Bush preferred kidnapping people and sticking them in secret prisons, Obama prefers using robots to assassinate from afar, no messy legal challenges that way. We have a monopoly on the robots now but they are only going to get cheaper in the future and everybody will have them, they will present a threat to all establishments. It is stupid for the USA to be going off on our "might makes right" arrogance destroying all international laws and norms. And for what? Do these dirt poor guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan really pose a threat to us? No they don't. The only solution in the future will be for everyone to come together to ban these machines, similar to the treaties against land mines and chemical weapons, but the U.S. will have no moral authority to do so. This future is not very far away.

epoxyhockey 15y ago

I'm going to take an optimistic stance on this topic and say that war technology evolves; we shouldn't be scared of it just because it was sci-fi 10 years ago. I think the development of the nuclear bomb was more scary than some line-manufactured drones. Yes, Obama has been awfully militant lately. He may have thought that it was the best thing he could do in an attempt to get positive approval ratings from the general public. Killing an American citizen w/o trial may have gone too far, even for middle America. The drone arms race is going to be an economical one. And, given the state of the world economy, no country is going to spend billions of dollars on a drone war anytime soon.

njharman 15y ago
Drones are far cheaper then other options. I'm taking a pessimistic view. When the costs of war are externalized (as they are now and will be even more so with drones and robots) we no lose the incentives to not have war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
- winestock 15y ago
  "It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee Fighting war with robots resembles video games. Everyone associates video games with fun. Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it. One of the reasons why the co-op portion of Portal 2 uses robots as player characters is that the designers knew that these characters would die frequently. In order to keep the E10+ rating and in order to quell any outrage, the designers used robots that are not even vaguely human in shape aside from the fact that they are bipedal. TVtropes calls the effect "Slapstick Sociopathy."
  - epoxyhockey 15y ago
    I disagree. Nuclear bombs are a "drop and forget" kind of munition. Killing people with drones is similar in that your side doesn't face much danger. But, once you show a picture of a city completely destroyed and skin melting off of the bodies of your enemies, the general public will determine that war is terrible.

jonmc12 15y ago

I always thought it would be cool if a company built a big bird's nest tower in cities that would host a bunch of flying drones. Then, consumers could rent the video-capture drones online to fly over approved areas, upon which the drones would return to nest for re-fueling. Think maybe you could subsidize the cost (possibly even make a profit) with the video data, or by streaming some feeds for the population to watch. Though have no idea of feasibility (FAA, equipment, real estate), I do like the idea of eyes in the sky for consumer benefit. Maybe something like this could be used for defense - giving population more awareness of airspace.

brd 15y ago
UAVs are currently not allowed to be flown by commercial entities in US airspace. If/when that changes it will be fascinating to watch the variety of startups that crop up to take advantage of it.
- rdtsc 15y ago
  However individuals can fly RC planes. What about companies making RC planes? Are they allowed to test fly them? Set one of those planes up with a deadly payload (use your imagination here) and you have a UAV...
epoxyhockey 15y ago
No nest needed, here's a sophisticated RC plane flying over NYC with no issue: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/how-a-rc-airplane-buzzed-the-statue-of-liberty-with-no-arrests.ars http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/how-a-rc-airplane...
ippisl 15y ago
This technology would also work great for nature movies and nature flight trips. Imagine you could rent rent an UAV , travel in Africa , from your home or a place with a giant screen , follow the great elephants crossing a river as if you were there.
- 15y ago

Game_Ender 15y ago

An area this article does not go into is how the increased use of robotics in the military could cause the military to classify large swaths of it as controlled weapons research. This would limit the ability of researchers and companies to publish or even work in that area.

shabble 15y ago
People like the GRASP[1] guys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM are probably somewhere pretty high on that list. They still need to solve the location sensing issues though - having high-precision calibrated wall mounted sensors aren't really practical for ad-hoc use. I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy use. [1] https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/ https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/

mathattack 15y ago

Everything we do that duhumanizes war comes with good ethical concerns (less loss of human life) but this doesn't make war any better. Drones - save our lives. Cruise missiles - save our lives. An A-bomb saved our lives. Not getting into as many wars would save the most lives. (Note: Some wars - like WW II are I admit unavoidable, but very few fall under this heading)

OstiaAntica 15y ago
World War II wasn't unavoidable. If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed. Specifically, the unsustainable reparations on Germany, and the French decision to occupy the German coal regions in the 1920s, destabilized the German economy and destroyed the Weimar Republic.
- billswift 15y ago
  Actually, the French/UK and German powers were pretty much evenly balanced. Woodrow Wilson's meddling in the war and especially in the "peace conference" afterward was the major factors that led to World War Two. And on the Japanese front, it was the economic embargo by the US, as a punitive measure for Japan's attacks on China, that triggered Pearl Harbor. That may actually have been more or less inevitable, the Japanese military had too much influence in their society at that time and were seriously out of touch with reality.
- mseebach 15y ago
  Most bad things are avoidable if you are able to predict the future.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed. And if it wasn't for Appeasement, if the western powers made good on their promises (especially the Anglo-Polish military alliance), Hitler could have been defeated before Germans managed to set the whole continent on fire; and if the French didn't put so much trust in the Maginot Line...

jebblue 15y ago

There was a Star Trek TV episode where two cities fought each other using computers. No spoilers on how it ended.

ars 15y ago

"If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say?" What difference does it make if they used a drone or did it the traditional way? An attack is an attack it makes no difference how you do it.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
wladimir 15y ago
When there are more and more nations with drones, it will be harder to trace them back to some nation-state. And with technology-only attacks there is no longer necessarily a nation-state with army behind it at all. Just an organization with a lot of capital. China could deny being involved. Or maybe the drones were infected with a computer virus (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004)

astrofinch 15y ago

>“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.” How about the fact that we're doing it, period? http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...

Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
And no less scary, 15-40% of the time a civilian is hit instead of the correct target. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker And given the dubious right of the CIA to hit there intended target in the first place, the acceptance of UAV strikes is disturbing to me.

grandalf 15y ago

Imagine when drones the size of dragonflies carry needles containing poison to assassination targets. Today's drones are very crude in comparison. Once it becomes plausible that any squirrel, mouse, dragon fly, etc. could be an assassination weapon, it will become necessary for heads of state to travel surrounded by swarms of friendly robots, in all sorts of form factors.

epoxyhockey 15y ago
I'll let you in on a little secret: Heads of states are generally not assassination targets by other country states. Why? If you were a country, would you like to deal with a decentralized/unofficial government that has no control over its citizens?
- 0x12 15y ago
  You're obviously not related to Hugo Chavez ;) Travel does not have to mean 'travel outside the country', so even if most attempts to decapitate a country are home-grown that doesn't mean that heads of state don't travel with a security entourage when they are within their own borders. On top of that I do believe that heads of state already travel with a security entourage when traveling abroad. It is not necessarily the other nations they're afraid of but their lunatics. And a small robot drone will be within the financial means of anybody with an axe to grind in the fairly near future.
- randomStuff 15y ago
  You clearly don't watch enough action movies. The historical record of virtually all attempts on a US presidents life being the result single individual acting alone, have no relevance. :P
- grandalf 15y ago
  Sometimes the goal of military action is not conquest. Well timed assassinations are hugely powerful (by foreign and domestic groups). One look at the presidential motorcade (or at the entourage of machine gun carrying thugs that accompany politicians in 3rd world countries) should make that quite clear.

alexhawket 15y ago

I'm more interested in the day when there are so many drones, they spend more time fighting each other and forget about the humans all together. We may never even see them, dogfighting above the clouds, save for a the perpetual flutter of broken parts falling from the heavens. Another possibility.. cities protected by phalanxes of model rocket sized guided missiles scanning perpetually for enemy drones.

InclinedPlane 15y ago
That's nonsensical. The chances of drone armies being so perfectly matched they always fight to a stalemate are basically zero. Ultimately one side will win, and then it will have a free hand. It's no different than a conventional air war in that regard.
- meric 15y ago
  It will have a free hand but then the other side will immediately surrender. Hopefully.

0x12 15y ago

Just like we have a moratorium on the use of chemical weapons we ought to have one on drones. Not that it would ever be ratified. There is something seriously wrong with the level of detachment drones afford the actors on any battlefield. Taking a life should be something done with a large level of reluctance and with the 'taker' risking his own through physical presence. Once that balance is lost it becomes all too easy to resort to violence at a much earlier stage of a conflict. This is all about reducing the barrier to entry for war and that's a very dangerous thing.

smackay 15y ago
I agree, but I think that threshold was crossed with the invention of the bow and arrow.
rdtsc 15y ago
Drone + neurotoxic chemicals = a deadly & cheap weapon?
- 0x12 15y ago
  Remind me to stay on your good side.

ck2 15y ago

And the race to make a working emp generator begins.

0x12 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compres...

padobson 15y ago

What I'm waiting for is this technology to be open to business and consumer solutions. I dream of a world where Amazon implements drone technology into their SOA fulfillment centers and makes it possible for orders to be delivered in hours or minutes instead of days. Imagine being a high school kid and having a job targeting drop zones for Amazon packages as drones make their final approaches. It'd be a heck of a lot cooler then driving a brown UPS truck.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I was tweeting the other day that we now live in a world where the president of the United States can, without judicial review, assassinate with robots an American Citizen living abroad because of their speech and influence on terrorists. Sounded crazy -- "death by robots" -- but that's about where we are (I don't differentiate between remote-operated vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles because it's not germane) We can't and won't torture a guy we pick up with a rocket launcher in his hand getting ready to kill us, but we can push a button and whack somebody who hangs out with really bad people. Don't forget collateral damage. And we call this morality. Telemetry and robotics are going to change the world in wildly dramatic ways over the next 50 years. Places like HN are where somewhat knowledgeable people can kick around these ideas now, before everybody and his NGO have their own killer robots.

dantheman 15y ago
We should never torture anyone for any reason, period. Including that in your statement above makes it sound like your endorse torture, I hope that you do not. We should also never, kill anyone who isn't a direct threat (e.g. on the battle field, shooting a cops/civilians, etc) regardless of where they are and whether or not they're US civilians. The assassination of OBL falls under the same idea, he should have been captured and tried by a jury.
adamjernst 15y ago
"Hangs out with really bad people"? Please. You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him. When someone is active on the battlefield, and there's no way to physically capture him, what do you expect?
- wvoq 15y ago
  > You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him. Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient. Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial. So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and no one bats an eyelash.