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We must stop and outlaw all autonomous weapon systems right now. No one can win this. The dollar cost per KIA is going to quickly drop below $20. And this will

• kragen 4y ago
  I think you're being unreasonably optimistic. Outlawing drones won't stop them. You'd have to outlaw general-purpose computers, and that law would still only last until the next war between great powers.
  • sitkack 4y ago
    We did a pretty good job with chemical weapons. I realize that autonomous weapons have a couple orders of magnitude in specificity, range, stealth, etc. We don't have to just accept defeat.
    • baybal2 4y ago
    • picsao 4y ago
    • chr1 4y ago
      Chemical weapons are rarely used only because they are not very effective. If they were effective they would not be outlawed. When we invent a version that will be practical to use, (e.g. small hard to notice drone capable to spray highly poisonous chemical right in enemy barracks) all the "success" in outlawing we had will instantly disappear.
    • kragen 4y ago
      Chemical weapons are little-used because they don't work very well, even compared to soldiers with bayonets, much less compared to the Bomb. Producing chemical weapons is very dangerous and requires large industrial facilities. By contrast, precision-guided munitions make the Bomb obsolete (it's great at killing people but it's a comparatively crude means of coercion by comparison), and they can be produced inexpensively from widely available materials. We should be planning how to preserve what we can from defeat.
    • adrianN 4y ago
      Chemical weapons were successfully outlawed because they're not terribly useful in war: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
    • pjc50 4y ago
      Until a couple of GRU officers went on a tour of Salisbury and poisoned three people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_Skripal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_... There's also disputed allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria. I'm not sure why they've not been seen in Ukraine yet; I think we're back to "not actually that effective in open warfare".
      • nibbleshifter 4y ago
        The only people disputing the claims in Syria are idiots tbh. As for why they aren't seeing use in Ukraine? They aren't very useful on the battlefield in most circumstances. Dan Kaszeta (a well regarded expert on the matter) has had a fair bit to say about this.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• kumarvvr 4y ago
  In a cynical way, this would mean no more wars. Once the world sees a few wars where the drones win, every country on earth is going to get them. They are cheap, can be made by university students, can be weaponized in a myriad of ways and can be deployed from far away (UAVs with a thousand drones, can deploy them thousands of kilometers) and they are disposable. Silent drones with autonomous instructions, will be the ultimate booby trap.
  • mach1ne 4y ago
    A new weapon always begets new counter-weapons. They may provide sufficiently believable protection from the drones, though not all-encompassing. Wars may become somewhat bloodier and a lot scarier. In any case, I highly doubt drones would do much to end wars. Rifles, artillery and other super-killers of the 20th century certainly didn't.
    • kumarvvr 4y ago
      > A new weapon always begets new counter-weapons Not always. The only counter weapon to a Nuke, is a similar sized or bigger Nuke, better delivery systems for the nuke and a large number of nukes.
      • ISL 4y ago
        Nuclear weapons can be countered by other WMDs, by cyberwarfare, by propaganda and misinformation, by economic warfare, and many more. Once launched, nuclear weapons are difficult, but not impossible (see ABM defense systems) to counter, but there are many ways to counter their unlaunched effects.
      • asdff 4y ago
        You can also use something like the NIKE missile system or the iron dome.
        • MichaelZuo 4y ago
          NIKE was abandoned because it cost something like 10x more to shoot down an incoming missile than it took the Soviets to launch one. And the Israeli iron dome is in an entirely different class, its hundreds of times too slow. Like trying to use a sling to shoot down a cruise missile. Actually this is a very good example of why counter-drone systems will likely never deter expansion of drone capabilities. The costs to provide full protection are simply too lopsided. Why spend a billion dollars to protect against 100 million dollars worth of drones when you could simply buy a billion dollars worth of drones in the first place?
• bergenty 4y ago
  I don’t think you can do this anymore, cats out of the bag. I mean hypothetically anyone can kill someone with a drone right now and it would be pretty hard to track down who did it. Just have a drone with a gun or knife attached and fly down at the person as they leave the house. Have you seen FPV drones? They’re extremely responsive, fast and small. You could do it from miles away, even another country.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > cats out of the bag. Yeah, the autonomous weapons cat left the bag decades ago. Acoustic homing torpedoes were first used during WW2, and became very sophisticated during the Cold War. Missiles that can be fired blind and left to find their own targets were also developed during the Cold War, like the (since discontinued) anti-ship variant of the Tomahawk. "Autonomous weapon" describes a lot of systems already in use. Banning them all is DOA in America, let alone in Russia/China/etc. They're too useful to ban. America won't even sign the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines (because the American military considers them important in Korea.)
    • bergenty 4y ago
      There’s a difference here though. Someone could decide to do something and have it ready to go the next day with a prime delivery and like a hundred bucks.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Anything like that is already banned for civilians (not that it will stop somebody clever and motivated enough..) The question is whether the American government would accept banning itself from having autonomous weapons. I think they wouldn't; they're too useful and already normalized.
• ls15 4y ago
  > We must stop and outlaw all autonomous weapon systems right now. Sure, but how do you get Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un and all of their other soul mates into the boat?
  • cmroanirgo 4y ago
    Perhaps rather than assuming that the other should lower their weapons first, it might be more prudent to lower your own first.
    • Hayvok 4y ago
      This approach was tried by Britain and France in the 1920s and 30s. Didn’t end well.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      Works great statistically if you don't much care for your own particular continued survival.
    • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      This is the opinion of an individual or state who has not fully reckoned with existential threats.
  • r00fus 4y ago
    Here's how it actually works: US moves to outlaw something after they have an unassailable supremacy in that area (see: nuclear weapons test ban). So we'll eventually outlaw them once we have a strong edge.
• dogcomplex 4y ago
  They will be "banned" by the major powers who can afford sufficient defenses against them (US, Russia, China, etc), with periodic "terrorist" strikes by "unknown actors" with a pattern of only mild convenience to said major powers. Meanwhile these powers will maintain strategic reserves of the drones only ever used for training. That is assuming there remains any defense against these drones by new or conventional warfare. This might be a legitimate threat to major military forces themselves at some point.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  Don't take it the wrong way, but I just have to laugh. This is how children think. How are you going to fix this with a law? The whole problem arises because drones are easily hackable and the technology stack involved is cheap and open. Countries make them, what are you gonna do, sanction them? You could build a drone swarm in your garage and it will be harmless right up to the moment you choose to weaponize it. Chemical weapons are a terrible parallel because while you don't necessarily need big industrial facilities, it's not that easy to conceal. But there is so much you can do with autonomous systems that's completely innocuous, in much the same way that you can't do a whole lot about cyberwarfare just by declaring it illegal. I mean look the guy who assassinated Shinzo Abe; Japan is about the most law-abiding country going, guns are rare, and as an island it's super-easy to control imports and exports, so the guy just built one out of parts from the hardware store/garden center. Weapons are just not that hard to make, and if you're inclined toward lateral thinking the possibilities for drones are near endless. To be frank I think a lot of military drone people are missing a trick because they have unrealistically large budgets to play with so demand these impressive but very expensive models that are designed to be part of an infantry loadout and deliver guaranteed kills from around the corner or through the hole of a pillbox.
  • ahelwer 4y ago
    It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation. The thesis of drone warfare is that quantity has a quality all of its own. Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity. Not 100% effective, but nobody asks this. All of everyday life holds the small chance of disaster. Being much less likely to die via drone attack is valuable even if the odd rogue attack succeeds.
    • bostonsre 4y ago
      What about the nation state actors that don't sign on to the pledge? Ukraine would be at a significant disadvantage if they were playing by these hypothetical rules but Russia didn't.
• hoseja 4y ago
  "We must stop and outlaw crossbows right now."
• jrm4 4y ago
  The more history of war I read, the more I realize how much it ends up looking like iterations of games -- which is to say that, it's not like this scary ever-increasing destructiveness. Certain ways of doing war just seem to go in and out of fashion. All to say, for better or worse, this all could be just as scary RIGHT NOW, but for whatever reason it isn't. No reason to believe "uh oh, here comes potentially scary tech, better try to blanket ban it now."
• Invictus0 4y ago
  Yes, and while we're at it, let's outlaw war and murder too!