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Killing Robots and Just War Theory

27 points by behindai 4y ago

therobot24 4y ago
this site is much more usable when no-script blocks any javascript
torstenvl 4y ago
I'm not sure what the HN policy is when the original title is heavily editorialized, but I flagged this submission for editorialization and for politics. The linked post does not discuss Just War Theory at all. It discusses political positions of certain thought leaders as pertain to IHL. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except (a) if you're quoting Jonathan Parry more than Thomas Aquinas, what you're discussing isn't Just War Theory, even if it is desperately trying to claim that philosophical heritage; and (b) it isn't a "theory" at all because, within a secular framework, there is neither a set of foundational premises accepted universally as truth nor any testability. Just War Theory is only a "theory" within a Catholic epistemological framework. If your epistemological framework does not include a deity or the possibility of one day conversing with that deity, then it's meaningless to talk about your interpretation of their rules as being true or false.
- no-dr-onboard 4y ago
  Thank you for your concern in trying to make the HN community a better place. A couple of things I noticed though: editorialization rules, ime, tend to be enforced when the title clearly differs from the content. I don’t think that is the case here and you’ve demonstrated as much. Second, politics are commonly discussed. A brief foray into any of the popular conversations throughout the week will show that there really is no hard and fast rule determining where “politics” begins or ends.
- behindai 4y ago
  I am not sure that the fact that you didn't get the point of the article allows you to mark it for "editorialization".
lordnacho 4y ago
I'm no expert on ethics but what I've read about just war is unconvincing. It's just not clear to me what a reasonable justification is. Say it's if you're being attacked... I guess we'd all agree if your neighbor is driving armor over the border, you're being attacked. But can you attack them before they get the border? Surely yes, why would you wait until they have the greatest advantage? What about when the order is given? Surely yes, why wait two weeks for them to organize themselves? Hit them while they're getting ready to kill you. What about while they're deciding? Of course, thinking about attacking is threatening too. Get them while they're deciding, that way you minimize the amount of harm you have to cause to them. What about if they're simply driving their armor around, building up just in case you attack them? That seems fair, doesn't it? But why should you let them threaten you into giving any concessions? It just never really seems like it ends. There's always some wrinkle where you can say "but he started it" and it's not actually all that clear. By the same logic, I don't see how you can really say your war is just, just because you follow certain rules. "We won't kill any civilians" seems fair, but like it says in the article, there are no civilians. They're either driving a tank, or they built the tank, or they clean the tank, or they bought the tank, or they trained the driver, or they say nice things to the tank driver. Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. I mean sure, if you can roll into their capital and everybody thinks it's great, we won't have to pour agent orange all over. But if it's not going our way, we will lower our standards. First by saying things that aren't nice, then by doing things that aren't nice. This is why international conflicts are not simply decided by a tug-of-war or a game of football. We can't accept the result thus far, so we will do something not nice, anything between sending diplomats home to ICBMs, until we get our way. The fact is there are no rules, we only say there were rules and that the loser broke them. If we'd lost, they'd say we did something wrong. /rant
- watwut 4y ago
  > Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. If they happen only after things are desperate enough, it is already improvement. Some countries seem to do them routinely, whether things are desperate or not.
- 4y ago
michaelt 4y ago
I once had a robotics professor who argued cruise missiles meet most definitions of 'robot'. Meaning, of course, that we've had killer robots for decades. (I suspect his larger point was that, if you try to come up with a definition which includes an industrial robot arm, a bomb disposal robot, and a robot vacuum cleaner, those things don't actually have much in common - so your definition will sweep up a bunch of things that most people wouldn't call robots)
- karpierz 4y ago
  Landmines are autonomous killing robots; start one up and it'll kill of its own accord.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yetihehe 4y ago
    That's overstretching a definition of robots. Mines are simple mechanisms. Robots should at least move a little.
    - zehaeva 4y ago
      They do have those mines that popup out of the ground and then explode, is that enough movement?
      - yetihehe 4y ago
        No, by that definition, anything that moves is a robot. A rock rolling from a hill would be a robot. This makes "robot" word useless.
binarymax 4y ago
This treatise only focuses on one point of view from two studies, and asks if killer robots are OK. But there are plenty of other philosophies and ethical/logical paths one can take. In particular the article doesn’t touch upon nonviolent resistance, which one can argue is more ethical than self defense. I also don’t agree that you can reduce war to a series of individuals protecting their right not to be killed and therefore war at scale is justified in a general sense. I do appreciate the mention of information asymmetry for conscription as a flaw in ethical standing by those who would wage war, but this is obvious since that’s how pretty much every war has ever been started. Machines designed to kill people don’t have any ethical escape route. They are by definition evil constructs. The creation and use of an evil construct is not justified in any ethical argument.
kkfx 4y ago
The actual trend toward robotization have nothing about moral, humanitarian or legal reasons but more about how to ensure obeisance: actual government derive all toward dictatorship and all dictatorship knows that a certain point in time people will revolt, robots will not. In the past there were no means to minimize the needs of loyal humans, workers are humans, soldiers are humans etc, now automation reach a sufficient point to automate *some* aspects, on one side might be sold in moral, humanitarian, legal terms etc, in some aspects might also really be, but the real target is just the old classic race toward absolute power.
- pdfernhout 4y ago
  Sadly your point may be correct about automation being used right now more to control people more free them (even as technologists including me had higher hopes decades ago, e.g. Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines You may find of interest this essay on "The Mythology of Wealth" on economic mythologies used to justify social pyramids and with a small elite at the top: https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla.com/mythologyofwealth.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla.... See this online book by Marshall Brain on robots being used to concentrate wealth (see especially the chapter "Robotic Freedom" from which this text comes): https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation "The Concentration of Wealth: If you look at our economy as a whole, you can understand why robots have the potential to be so disruptive if we do not handle their arrival properly. ..." And what is often ignored is that as automation -- especially computing -- makes it possible for one person to do more, even if a human is still needed in an economic loop somewhere, it weakens the financial bargaining position of many other humans (assuming demand does not rise as fast as capacity) who must trade their labor for kanban-token-like ration units (i.e. fiat dollars) in order to survive or maybe in some cases thrive. So we don't need full automation for all this to be very disruptive economically. And we are already seeing some of this as people with less tech or other skills are falling by the wayside economically and their marriages and lives are disintegrating (or never happening in the first place) and they turn to drugs to relieve the pain and so on leading to "deaths of despair". That is something we may see greatly accelerate as driving is automated given how important economically driving jobs are to many people with just a high school education. But even highly rewarded skills today can become rapidly obsolete through technology (like a radiologist reading x-rays or a broker trading stocks). And eventually programmers may see that happen to their livelihoods too. Of course, revolutions often turn out to be different then expected, as usually it is the best organized who take power (like in Iran durign the 1970s, the students revolted bu it was the better-organized religious hardliners who ultimately prevailed). Related Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us." But when you have robots guards (e.g. in the movie "Elysium"), then who cares about human revolts? Still, there is cause for optimism (also from Zinn): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertainty/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertain... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability." See Marshall Brain's novelette "Manna" as a fictionalization of wealth concentration and total surveillance from automation and an social alternative. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" for an inspiring vision of alternative. https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp... Or Theodore Sturgeons's 1956 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the two-sided coin of freedom/subservience and technology: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/... Or this essay I put together around 2010 mentions lots of alternatives (both good and bad ones): https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society." Ultimately though this comes down to a need for a change of heart as implied by my sig (amplifying and expanding on what many others like Albert Einstein and Bucky Fuller have said): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
yboris 4y ago
An aside about "Just War Theory" (JWT). I took a semester course in philosophy with Jeff McMahan (who has been working in this area for a long time). Having a theory (and a thus set of rules most countries try to follow) is better than nothing, but the current theory seems absurd. It exculpates soldiers from participating in war - it claims they are not doing anything wrong when they follow orders to kill other combatants. The simplest example of a justified war is one of defense (like what Ukraine is engaging in). But under JWT, even though Russia is not justified in its actions, the individual soldiers are morally permitted to follow orders to kill combatants. Thankfully, at least, under JWT soldiers are not justified in following orders to kill noncombatants.
- no-dr-onboard 4y ago
  Another popular individual who speaks at length about JWT is Greg Bahnsen. I recently listened to a podcast[1] that contained an excerpt of a radio program he did in discussing the topic around 2001. Even if you disagree with Bahnsen, the audio is astounding as it shows an era where informed listeners actually call in to have legitimate discussion with the radio guest. It truly is a blast from the past and worth listening to if only for the brief solace that comes from realizing that true academic conversation existed just 20 years ago. 1. https://all-of-christ-for-all-of-life.castos.com/episodes/just-war-theory-greg-bahnsen https://all-of-christ-for-all-of-life.castos.com/episodes/ju...
- yks 4y ago
  But then individual soldiers from the attacking side are granted "protection" against mistreatment as prisoners of war, even when that war itself is a crime (against peace) and even when those soldiers themselves commit all war crimes under the sun. Obviously vendetta culture does not bring humanity to the bright place but this protection line, drawn at the possession of the regular army soldier ID, is a rather absurd one.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Imo, that is orthogonal. Soldiers being protected from random mistreatment as prisoners of war is ok no matter whether they committed crime or not.
tttrinidad 4y ago
pdfernhout 4y ago
The "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" website has not seen fit to post yet a comment I made there a few days ago on "Russia may have used a killer robot in Ukraine. Now what?": https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-killer-robot-in-ukraine-now-what/#comment-40002 https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-kille... So I will put a copy of what I posted there here on HN, since it is relevant to the bigger picture of killer robots: I've thought about how to mitigate the risks of (potentially self-replicating) autonomous military robots and other potential WMDs since the 1980s when I was a visitor at the CMU Robotics labs of Hans Moravec and Red Whittaker, and also from taking classes with Frank von Hippel, Steve Slaby, George Miller, Gerry O'Neill, and Jim Beniger at Princeton, and from hanging out a few times with Freeman Dyson at the IAS and also talking with Ted Taylor (who Freeman Dyson put me in touch with) -- as well as talking to many other people and reading widely on this and related issues (both non-fiction and also insightful fiction, like James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear). My thoughts on this are summarized in an essay I wrote in 2010 on my website "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism". Essentially, political controls will likely ultimately fail in the long-term given that parties to the (unlikely-in-any-case) political agreements have big incentives to cheat as long as they view the world in zero-sum competitive terms. As Freeman Dyson has explained in his book "Weapons and Hope", as long as the capacity to build WMDs remains they will always be a potential issue regardless of what treaties exist. The capacity to build such things eventually will always exist in an advanced technosphere. Right now it is relatively easy to build bioweapons and drones, and much harder to build nukes (which potentially might get easier with new advances in physics and material science). Frankly, we are doomed if we depend on political treaties alone to deal with this. What might succeed is ultimately a change of heart to A Newer Way of Thinking (like Albert Einstein and others like Donald Pet have talked about). Such a change of heart will involve emphasizing mutual security, intrinsic security, and achieving abundance from all through wise use of advanced technology. It will be a cultural change that makes the biggest difference, where in the long-term various political agreements might at most just reflect a global change of heart and perspective. On a practical basis, tools that reflect a newer way of collaborative thinking like Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Jeff Conklin) and Convergent Facilitation (Miki Kashtan) may help groups a lot in thinking of better solutions that address the needs of everyone. Better Free and Open Source Intelligence tools widely deployed may also help everyone make better decisions and avoid disasters like Ukraine. ==== More Details To that end of a change of heart and perspective towards a newer way of thinking, here are the main points from that essay: Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") ... and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ... --Paul Fernhout "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

27 points by behindai 4y ago

this site is much more usable when no-script blocks any javascript

I'm not sure what the HN policy is when the original title is heavily editorialized, but I flagged this submission for editorialization and for politics. The linked post does not discuss Just War Theory at all. It discusses political positions of certain thought leaders as pertain to IHL. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except (a) if you're quoting Jonathan Parry more than Thomas Aquinas, what you're discussing isn't Just War Theory, even if it is desperately trying to claim that philosophical heritage; and (b) it isn't a "theory" at all because, within a secular framework, there is neither a set of foundational premises accepted universally as truth nor any testability. Just War Theory is only a "theory" within a Catholic epistemological framework. If your epistemological framework does not include a deity or the possibility of one day conversing with that deity, then it's meaningless to talk about your interpretation of their rules as being true or false.

no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Thank you for your concern in trying to make the HN community a better place. A couple of things I noticed though: editorialization rules, ime, tend to be enforced when the title clearly differs from the content. I don’t think that is the case here and you’ve demonstrated as much. Second, politics are commonly discussed. A brief foray into any of the popular conversations throughout the week will show that there really is no hard and fast rule determining where “politics” begins or ends.
behindai 4y ago
I am not sure that the fact that you didn't get the point of the article allows you to mark it for "editorialization".

lordnacho 4y ago

I'm no expert on ethics but what I've read about just war is unconvincing. It's just not clear to me what a reasonable justification is. Say it's if you're being attacked... I guess we'd all agree if your neighbor is driving armor over the border, you're being attacked. But can you attack them before they get the border? Surely yes, why would you wait until they have the greatest advantage? What about when the order is given? Surely yes, why wait two weeks for them to organize themselves? Hit them while they're getting ready to kill you. What about while they're deciding? Of course, thinking about attacking is threatening too. Get them while they're deciding, that way you minimize the amount of harm you have to cause to them. What about if they're simply driving their armor around, building up just in case you attack them? That seems fair, doesn't it? But why should you let them threaten you into giving any concessions? It just never really seems like it ends. There's always some wrinkle where you can say "but he started it" and it's not actually all that clear. By the same logic, I don't see how you can really say your war is just, just because you follow certain rules. "We won't kill any civilians" seems fair, but like it says in the article, there are no civilians. They're either driving a tank, or they built the tank, or they clean the tank, or they bought the tank, or they trained the driver, or they say nice things to the tank driver. Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. I mean sure, if you can roll into their capital and everybody thinks it's great, we won't have to pour agent orange all over. But if it's not going our way, we will lower our standards. First by saying things that aren't nice, then by doing things that aren't nice. This is why international conflicts are not simply decided by a tug-of-war or a game of football. We can't accept the result thus far, so we will do something not nice, anything between sending diplomats home to ICBMs, until we get our way. The fact is there are no rules, we only say there were rules and that the loser broke them. If we'd lost, they'd say we did something wrong. /rant

watwut 4y ago
> Likewise "we won't use WMD/cluster bombs/rape/genocide". All those things will happen if things get desperate enough. If they happen only after things are desperate enough, it is already improvement. Some countries seem to do them routinely, whether things are desperate or not.
4y ago

michaelt 4y ago

I once had a robotics professor who argued cruise missiles meet most definitions of 'robot'. Meaning, of course, that we've had killer robots for decades. (I suspect his larger point was that, if you try to come up with a definition which includes an industrial robot arm, a bomb disposal robot, and a robot vacuum cleaner, those things don't actually have much in common - so your definition will sweep up a bunch of things that most people wouldn't call robots)

karpierz 4y ago
Landmines are autonomous killing robots; start one up and it'll kill of its own accord.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yetihehe 4y ago
  That's overstretching a definition of robots. Mines are simple mechanisms. Robots should at least move a little.
  - zehaeva 4y ago
    They do have those mines that popup out of the ground and then explode, is that enough movement?
    - yetihehe 4y ago
      No, by that definition, anything that moves is a robot. A rock rolling from a hill would be a robot. This makes "robot" word useless.

binarymax 4y ago

This treatise only focuses on one point of view from two studies, and asks if killer robots are OK. But there are plenty of other philosophies and ethical/logical paths one can take. In particular the article doesn’t touch upon nonviolent resistance, which one can argue is more ethical than self defense. I also don’t agree that you can reduce war to a series of individuals protecting their right not to be killed and therefore war at scale is justified in a general sense. I do appreciate the mention of information asymmetry for conscription as a flaw in ethical standing by those who would wage war, but this is obvious since that’s how pretty much every war has ever been started. Machines designed to kill people don’t have any ethical escape route. They are by definition evil constructs. The creation and use of an evil construct is not justified in any ethical argument.

kkfx 4y ago

The actual trend toward robotization have nothing about moral, humanitarian or legal reasons but more about how to ensure obeisance: actual government derive all toward dictatorship and all dictatorship knows that a certain point in time people will revolt, robots will not. In the past there were no means to minimize the needs of loyal humans, workers are humans, soldiers are humans etc, now automation reach a sufficient point to automate *some* aspects, on one side might be sold in moral, humanitarian, legal terms etc, in some aspects might also really be, but the real target is just the old classic race toward absolute power.

pdfernhout 4y ago
Sadly your point may be correct about automation being used right now more to control people more free them (even as technologists including me had higher hopes decades ago, e.g. Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines You may find of interest this essay on "The Mythology of Wealth" on economic mythologies used to justify social pyramids and with a small elite at the top: https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla.com/mythologyofwealth.htm https://web.archive.org/web/2007*/http://conceptualguerilla.... See this online book by Marshall Brain on robots being used to concentrate wealth (see especially the chapter "Robotic Freedom" from which this text comes): https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation https://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation "The Concentration of Wealth: If you look at our economy as a whole, you can understand why robots have the potential to be so disruptive if we do not handle their arrival properly. ..." And what is often ignored is that as automation -- especially computing -- makes it possible for one person to do more, even if a human is still needed in an economic loop somewhere, it weakens the financial bargaining position of many other humans (assuming demand does not rise as fast as capacity) who must trade their labor for kanban-token-like ration units (i.e. fiat dollars) in order to survive or maybe in some cases thrive. So we don't need full automation for all this to be very disruptive economically. And we are already seeing some of this as people with less tech or other skills are falling by the wayside economically and their marriages and lives are disintegrating (or never happening in the first place) and they turn to drugs to relieve the pain and so on leading to "deaths of despair". That is something we may see greatly accelerate as driving is automated given how important economically driving jobs are to many people with just a high school education. But even highly rewarded skills today can become rapidly obsolete through technology (like a radiologist reading x-rays or a broker trading stocks). And eventually programmers may see that happen to their livelihoods too. Of course, revolutions often turn out to be different then expected, as usually it is the best organized who take power (like in Iran durign the 1970s, the students revolted bu it was the better-organized religious hardliners who ultimately prevailed). Related Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica—expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us." But when you have robots guards (e.g. in the movie "Elysium"), then who cares about human revolts? Still, there is cause for optimism (also from Zinn): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertainty/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/optimism-uncertain... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability." See Marshall Brain's novelette "Manna" as a fictionalization of wealth concentration and total surveillance from automation and an social alternative. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 See James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear" for an inspiring vision of alternative. https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp... Or Theodore Sturgeons's 1956 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the two-sided coin of freedom/subservience and technology: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/... Or this essay I put together around 2010 mentions lots of alternatives (both good and bad ones): https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society." Ultimately though this comes down to a need for a change of heart as implied by my sig (amplifying and expanding on what many others like Albert Einstein and Bucky Fuller have said): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

yboris 4y ago

An aside about "Just War Theory" (JWT). I took a semester course in philosophy with Jeff McMahan (who has been working in this area for a long time). Having a theory (and a thus set of rules most countries try to follow) is better than nothing, but the current theory seems absurd. It exculpates soldiers from participating in war - it claims they are not doing anything wrong when they follow orders to kill other combatants. The simplest example of a justified war is one of defense (like what Ukraine is engaging in). But under JWT, even though Russia is not justified in its actions, the individual soldiers are morally permitted to follow orders to kill combatants. Thankfully, at least, under JWT soldiers are not justified in following orders to kill noncombatants.

no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Another popular individual who speaks at length about JWT is Greg Bahnsen. I recently listened to a podcast[1] that contained an excerpt of a radio program he did in discussing the topic around 2001. Even if you disagree with Bahnsen, the audio is astounding as it shows an era where informed listeners actually call in to have legitimate discussion with the radio guest. It truly is a blast from the past and worth listening to if only for the brief solace that comes from realizing that true academic conversation existed just 20 years ago. 1. https://all-of-christ-for-all-of-life.castos.com/episodes/just-war-theory-greg-bahnsen https://all-of-christ-for-all-of-life.castos.com/episodes/ju...
yks 4y ago
But then individual soldiers from the attacking side are granted "protection" against mistreatment as prisoners of war, even when that war itself is a crime (against peace) and even when those soldiers themselves commit all war crimes under the sun. Obviously vendetta culture does not bring humanity to the bright place but this protection line, drawn at the possession of the regular army soldier ID, is a rather absurd one.
- watwut 4y ago
  Imo, that is orthogonal. Soldiers being protected from random mistreatment as prisoners of war is ok no matter whether they committed crime or not.

tttrinidad 4y ago

pdfernhout 4y ago

The "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" website has not seen fit to post yet a comment I made there a few days ago on "Russia may have used a killer robot in Ukraine. Now what?": https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-killer-robot-in-ukraine-now-what/#comment-40002 https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-kille... So I will put a copy of what I posted there here on HN, since it is relevant to the bigger picture of killer robots: I've thought about how to mitigate the risks of (potentially self-replicating) autonomous military robots and other potential WMDs since the 1980s when I was a visitor at the CMU Robotics labs of Hans Moravec and Red Whittaker, and also from taking classes with Frank von Hippel, Steve Slaby, George Miller, Gerry O'Neill, and Jim Beniger at Princeton, and from hanging out a few times with Freeman Dyson at the IAS and also talking with Ted Taylor (who Freeman Dyson put me in touch with) -- as well as talking to many other people and reading widely on this and related issues (both non-fiction and also insightful fiction, like James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear). My thoughts on this are summarized in an essay I wrote in 2010 on my website "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism". Essentially, political controls will likely ultimately fail in the long-term given that parties to the (unlikely-in-any-case) political agreements have big incentives to cheat as long as they view the world in zero-sum competitive terms. As Freeman Dyson has explained in his book "Weapons and Hope", as long as the capacity to build WMDs remains they will always be a potential issue regardless of what treaties exist. The capacity to build such things eventually will always exist in an advanced technosphere. Right now it is relatively easy to build bioweapons and drones, and much harder to build nukes (which potentially might get easier with new advances in physics and material science). Frankly, we are doomed if we depend on political treaties alone to deal with this. What might succeed is ultimately a change of heart to A Newer Way of Thinking (like Albert Einstein and others like Donald Pet have talked about). Such a change of heart will involve emphasizing mutual security, intrinsic security, and achieving abundance from all through wise use of advanced technology. It will be a cultural change that makes the biggest difference, where in the long-term various political agreements might at most just reflect a global change of heart and perspective. On a practical basis, tools that reflect a newer way of collaborative thinking like Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Jeff Conklin) and Convergent Facilitation (Miki Kashtan) may help groups a lot in thinking of better solutions that address the needs of everyone. Better Free and Open Source Intelligence tools widely deployed may also help everyone make better decisions and avoid disasters like Ukraine. ==== More Details To that end of a change of heart and perspective towards a newer way of thinking, here are the main points from that essay: Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") ... and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ... --Paul Fernhout "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."