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So, here's the nasty undercurrent to all this, right? Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human

So, here's the nasty undercurrent to all this, right? Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human beings. Engineering dictates that we'll eventually optimize away the part of the control system that is slowest and most prone to failure: the people. The discussion of "How can we keep people running the robots" is uninteresting, because the entire deck is stacked to guarantee that it will be rendered moot. ~ The real discussion--I posit--is somewhat darker and more chilling: In order to field a drone army, you need capital. You need factories to build the devices, you need command and control infrastructure to deploy them, and you need bright minds to develop them. Drone warfare is difficult to conduct in any meaningful fashion as a third-world nation, or more importantly as a populace in rebellion. To put it bluntly, the use of these engines of war is limited only to the rich kids, and there is no chance for appeal or mercy when you are identified as a target. Think about that for a second. The wealthy murderer who decides to unleash these does so without any skin in the game, without any chance of dealing with repercussions back home for lost sons and daughters, without any care whatsoever except for a line-item expense. Stubborn rebel holdout? Spin up more terminators the same way we spin up dynos to deal with spikes in load. The teenage kid holding the rusted AK their parent just dropped, looking at the robot which just made them an orphan? No chance in hell that they'll be spared because they are obviously not a threat--they are a human wielding an automatic rifle, p = .975, execute. ~ This whole thing needs to become verboten, forbidden, the same way we nominally treat chemical and biological weapons. If we support our .gov and .mil in the use of these weapons, we'll be doing everyone a disservice, and come the day we decide to rescind the support which backs those bastards, we'll find that they no longer need our support for they already have the drones and the capital to make their whims felt.

chm 13y ago
Everything about modern warfare is for the rich kids.
- angersock 13y ago
  http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm To a point, sure, but the prior to drones an unwilling population could make it costly indeed--politically--for an occupation force to hold ground. With drones, though, there's no longer a blood cost associated with oppression.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    How exactly does a drone replace boots on the ground - bipedal robots at the moment are fabulously expensive corporate toys - I doubt that asimo is going to be replacing a squaddie anytime soon
    - angersock 13y ago
      There are numerous examples of simple tracked vehicles armed with weapons. It does not take much imagination to see how those combined with larger drones (tanks, humvees), artillery, or aircraft could be used.
      - walshemj 13y ago
        Um real warfighting isn't like anime where cute chicks in tight fitting catsuits fight with giant robots. Tracked vehicles have the dalek problem how do you go inside a building/cave to engage the enemy - watch black hawk down how do you replace a seal team or ranger brick with robots And any military tracked vehicle is not simple one of the main reasons that MBT's still have 4 man crews is they need the fleshy meatbags to keep the bugger running.
        angersock 13y ago
        how do you go inside a building/cave to engage the enemy That would be where the airstrikes and artillery come in, right? any military tracked vehicle Think smaller, like on the order of one of the Talon defusal robots ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON ). ~ real warfighting Here's really the root of the problem. Thousands of years ago, real warfighting consisted of men in centuries and phalanxes, piking each other to death--it wasn't sporting to, for example, ambush a legion as it marched through a forest and cut them down ("Quintili Vare, legiones redde!"). A century and a half, "real warfighting" involved massed troops lining up across from one another and firing in volleys while ignoring civilians--it wasn't sporting to, for example, raze towns and crops and destroy railroad tracks in order to demoralize the enemy. Two decades ago, "real warfighting" involved massing mechanized infantry, achieving air superiority, and engaging regular forces until their ruler surrendered. The problem is that this notion of "real warfighting" is constantly changing. Once upon a time, real warfighting didn't involve violating neutral national borders and airspace and dropping munitions on civilians without having clear proof of the target or its strategic value. That is clearly no longer the case, as we've seen with the drone strikes that have been carried out. We can't ignore the probability that one day, "warfighting" will mean a text sent over IRC to an automated artillery battery to target a village and fire for effect, because the little killbots saw their one target disappear into a place with stairs.
- waps 13y ago
  Drone warfare, low-level warfare and terrorism would be the exceptions. Right now for drone warfare the software is too difficult to write (hard to believe. Hooking up opencv face recognizer to a robot that can aim a rifle is not hard). That will change. Not soon, it'll take maybe a decade. But it will change. Oh and ... dumb question ... who enforces any rules that are decided upon during war ? Without that component we might as well legislate the ethics of solar flares ... Right now there are tons of countries that are either in blatant violation of things like human rights and guilty of war crimes, and no-one's getting persecuted. Not just in problem countries like Iran or North Korea, there's plenty in Africa, Saudi Arabia would be another obvious example, even South America. Only in very specific cases does anything seem to happen ... it seems to me more of a pr-campaign than an actual attempt at enforcement. Not that having zero practical use or effectiveness has ever stopped anyone from legislating, but why not legislate something equally fictional, but more fun ? Let's legislate traffic lights for faster-than-light travel ! Or let's demand something be done about fictional abuse of Indonesian babies ! Won't somebody think of the children ? Let's legislate that no-one can award the "worst dressed sentient being in the universe" prize to the same character more than 6 times in either prose or poetry. Also it seems prudent to preventively outlaw Vogon poetry. These seem like more productive endeavours.
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    I agree that "making laws" isn't necessarily a solution, but it lays the foundation of future debates. This topic would no doubt involve a ton of debate and it would be VERY useful if it materializes into international law. "Why" you ask? Well because when someone violates it, there would be no question of whether this is right or wrong. We wouldn't have to go through the whole above debate all over again, just to come to a consensus that this was evil. You could just cite the law and (hopefully/in an ideal world) prosecute. Ps: They still might be able to cirumvent drone strikes by saying that by defintion of war agreed upon in the first geneva convention, it isn't war. so this rule doesn't apply. I hope they think of this when making the law
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    in line with the mention of the Geneva Convention in my other post, i just remembered something. I am not sure how legally correct this is it, but someone brought it up in a Model UN that govt officials who sanction drone strikes can NOT be tried for war crimes because they aren't technically Soldiers. If this is true, wtf? The rules seriously need major revision in sight of modern tech
- true_religion 13y ago
  Everything about warfare has always been stacked for the rich. Honestly, how could wealth disparity exist if didn't gain the rich the power to defend their wealth against those who would want to take it?
coffeemug 13y ago
The flipside of this argument is that wars happen anyway. We might as well use the machines to save lives. (I don't necessarily believe this; I don't know what I believe, but this is the other side of the debate). The prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan happened despite the repercussions for lost sons and daughters. We're losing people right now, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives because we didn't have enough manpower (or weren't willing to take the risk) to enforce order. If we could spin up machines the way we spin up dynos, these problems would go away. No American soldiers would die. We'd spin up production and deployment to enforce near total order. We could reduce Iraqi deaths by orders of magnitude. The machines don't necessarily have to act like terminators. They could act like military police too. This might be a scary future, no doubt. But it might be a bright one too. If we trust our values and trust that our elected representatives won't go on mindless killing sprees, the machines might be a blessing in disguise. (Also note that by the time we get machines with this capability, our government, social structure, our entire economic model, and our appreciation for civil liberties will evolve quite far from where it is now too).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- grey-area 13y ago
  We might as well use the machines to save lives...No American soldiers would die. We'd spin up production and deployment to enforce near total order. The mistakes made in Iraq which led to rebellion are complex, but they didn't have to do with manpower alone. Disbanding the army and most of the administration are the two largest mistakes IMO - those have nothing to with US manpower and meant a huge supply of Iraqis with nothing to lose, military training, and access to huge arms dumps. They could equally well fight and subvert machines as they could people. It's interesting the society you propose for Iraq as a bright new future - total order = totalitarian dictatorship imposed by force by a proconsul directing machines. Would you accept that for your own country? Would you rebel against it if a foreign army invaded on a pretext and occupied the country using robot warriors? We've already half-glimpsed that future with the use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen - and it isn't pretty, resulting in many more civilian deaths. I agree machine soldiers are almost inevitable, but it will not be a good thing - it'll be a further step in abstracting away warfare so that those ordering killings a world away risk nothing but money (easily reproduced) and domestic reputation (easily managed).
dba7dba 13y ago
'Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human beings' The disposable machines are built by human beings belonging to a nation (or entity) who are interested in self-preservation and protecting the nation. Of course profit doesn't hurt. Thinks about this. Lately, the rich nations are facing shortage of men willing or able to risk death/injury. The populace lacks the stomach. And the 'poorer' nations (ones with little to lose) have no qualms about bloodshed as long as they get what they want. I see drones in warfare as inevitable. How autonomous will they be? Think no one knows for sure at this point...
forktheif 13y ago
Your entire argument seems to be built around paranoid and hysteria and things you've seen in sci-fi movies. We already have drones that kill and injure human beings. They're called missiles and torpedoes, and the third world has plenty of them too. Also, there's this assumption that keeps getting made that humans will always make better decisions than machines. Personally, I think you're seriously overestimating the ability of scared, tired 18 year olds to make quick rational decisions under extreme pressure. Every single war ever, is littered with examples of human beings making mistakes, which end up with the deaths of allies or civilians, it's not even remotely rare. And you know what, machines will make mistakes too, they'll kill their own side or civilians occasionally. But after they do that, their software can be improved and refined, over and over and over, with no limit. They will constantly and forever be improved. A human soldier will not. There's only so much training you can give to someone in nine months before they're in combat. And there's also the fact that machines are a helluva a lot less likely to think it's funny to piss on a Koran or to go rape some of the locals.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  Interesting point. The machine soldiers would solve the problem of rampant soldiers raping locals. But if you look at drones, haven't the drones been around long enough? Their algorithm still seems to be faulty considering all the civilian casualties they have caused.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I don't think current drones are automated. They're glorified RC planes. It's still a human piloting and firing the weapons, albeit remotely.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Compared to area bombing like rolling thunder in Vietnam or Coventry or Hamburg in ww2
    - xerophtye 13y ago
      Point noted
Houshalter 13y ago
Modern warfare is already vastly stacked against the poorer side. This has arguably always been the case but it is especially true in the present with billion dollar warships and million dollar jets, missiles, satellites, etc. Not to mention nuclear missiles. Robots don't change anything. Your evil rich people can just as easily fight the rebels with human flown planes or human guided drones and paid mercenaries. And please with the "imagine a robot shooting a kid, we can't ever allow that to happen" hypothetical. Soldiers kill innocent people all the time, just on accident. Missiles miss, land mines get abandoned and kill innocent kids, warfare has never been tame. A robot would arguably be better because it might rarely if ever miss, it could have better vision than a human, it could possibly be a better judge than even a human with sufficient AI, and it never gets emotional, angry, or tired or insane.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  > it could possibly be a better judge than even a human Well then what aout all the children killed by drones[1]? [1] http://droneswatch.org/2013/01/20/list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen/ http://droneswatch.org/2013/01/20/list-of-children-killed-by...
  - yohui 13y ago
    This is the second time in this thread that you've brought up the shortcomings of current drones as evidence against the use of future robots. And it's the second you've conflated human-operated drones, possessed of little intelligence or ability to learn, with hypothetical fully-autonomous robots. Would these robots behave better than humans or human-controlled drones? That remains to be seen. But the emphasized shortcomings of current aerial drones are about as relevant to future aerial robots as RC toys are to self-deiving cars. (Much less future ground-based robots, which in uncertain situations might be able to choose a third option besides "shoot to kill" or "fly away".)
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Those kids were killed by people radio-controlling bombs, not by autonomous drones. On the other hand, how many civilians, including kids, have been killed by troops on the ground for motivations such as rape, boredom or robbery? Robots wouldn't have this motivation for useless/counterproductive violence, but some human soldiers unavoidably do.
briandear 13y ago
Right because if we ban it nobody will use it. Great idea!
- polymatter 13y ago
  well, its worked with nukes so far (mostly).
  - rainmaking 13y ago
    Because those who have nukes conveniently forbid their further proliferation.
Joeri 13y ago
Even if people are manning the drones, you could have one person handling thousands of drones, and just being offered a long series of yes/no prompts ("Shoot here?"). As long as there is any way for a country to decide to deploy drones they will find a way to comply with the letter of whatever restrictions you put in place. The drones are perhaps a good opportunity to look at the broader picture. Maybe we need to recognize that one country sending weapons and troops into another country on their own initiative is a fundamental violation of human rights and basic morality. The only way troops or weapons should be deployed is to stop greater harm from happening, and the only entity that can judge the greater harm is one that looks beyond national borders. For me the simplest way to "clean up" war is to make all war illegal, and only allow troop and weapon deployments outside of a country's own national borders under the UN banner for peacekeeping purposes. This sidesteps the rich kids vs poor kids issue because there is no us vs them, there is only the global community and how it polices itself. Not that the UN is necessarily ready for such a thing, but even in its inadequate capacity it would be a whole lot better than the horrible inhumane mess we are in right now.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  Yeah. Watch a pro playing starcraft. Keyboard and mouse, selecting and directing, almost faster than the eye can follow. This group of terminators, attack here. That group, charge the bunker over there.
  - rainmaking 13y ago
    Modern army control systems are already a lot like starcraft, even up to the progress bars that get shorter and change color as tank crew members get killed.
Shivetya 13y ago
Tell me how well that ban on chemical and biological weapons is working out. Lets be honest about it, the art has to be advanced in countries where it might be consider abhorrent to engage in such combat just to insure that when the other guy does use it it can be defended against. Automation is coming whether we like it or not. If we end up with a world were large armies are no longer fielded and only robots exist on the combat field perhaps we can move weapons to those that incapacitate instead of kill. We can only get there is we continue to push development. Regardless, strikes will become more surgical which could reduce casualties amongst non combatants. Figure it this way, if they become good enough maybe the leaders will be the ones looking over THEIR shoulders.
scotty79 13y ago
I find it insane that human with AK47 still poses any threat in the warzone. I look forward to the times when human with small arms has absolutely no value on the battlefield. War should be only for the richest kids.

chm 13y ago

Everything about modern warfare is for the rich kids.

angersock 13y ago
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_arith.htm To a point, sure, but the prior to drones an unwilling population could make it costly indeed--politically--for an occupation force to hold ground. With drones, though, there's no longer a blood cost associated with oppression.
- walshemj 13y ago
  How exactly does a drone replace boots on the ground - bipedal robots at the moment are fabulously expensive corporate toys - I doubt that asimo is going to be replacing a squaddie anytime soon
  - angersock 13y ago
    There are numerous examples of simple tracked vehicles armed with weapons. It does not take much imagination to see how those combined with larger drones (tanks, humvees), artillery, or aircraft could be used.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      Um real warfighting isn't like anime where cute chicks in tight fitting catsuits fight with giant robots. Tracked vehicles have the dalek problem how do you go inside a building/cave to engage the enemy - watch black hawk down how do you replace a seal team or ranger brick with robots And any military tracked vehicle is not simple one of the main reasons that MBT's still have 4 man crews is they need the fleshy meatbags to keep the bugger running.
      - angersock 13y ago
        how do you go inside a building/cave to engage the enemy That would be where the airstrikes and artillery come in, right? any military tracked vehicle Think smaller, like on the order of one of the Talon defusal robots ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON ). ~ real warfighting Here's really the root of the problem. Thousands of years ago, real warfighting consisted of men in centuries and phalanxes, piking each other to death--it wasn't sporting to, for example, ambush a legion as it marched through a forest and cut them down ("Quintili Vare, legiones redde!"). A century and a half, "real warfighting" involved massed troops lining up across from one another and firing in volleys while ignoring civilians--it wasn't sporting to, for example, raze towns and crops and destroy railroad tracks in order to demoralize the enemy. Two decades ago, "real warfighting" involved massing mechanized infantry, achieving air superiority, and engaging regular forces until their ruler surrendered. The problem is that this notion of "real warfighting" is constantly changing. Once upon a time, real warfighting didn't involve violating neutral national borders and airspace and dropping munitions on civilians without having clear proof of the target or its strategic value. That is clearly no longer the case, as we've seen with the drone strikes that have been carried out. We can't ignore the probability that one day, "warfighting" will mean a text sent over IRC to an automated artillery battery to target a village and fire for effect, because the little killbots saw their one target disappear into a place with stairs.
waps 13y ago
Drone warfare, low-level warfare and terrorism would be the exceptions. Right now for drone warfare the software is too difficult to write (hard to believe. Hooking up opencv face recognizer to a robot that can aim a rifle is not hard). That will change. Not soon, it'll take maybe a decade. But it will change. Oh and ... dumb question ... who enforces any rules that are decided upon during war ? Without that component we might as well legislate the ethics of solar flares ... Right now there are tons of countries that are either in blatant violation of things like human rights and guilty of war crimes, and no-one's getting persecuted. Not just in problem countries like Iran or North Korea, there's plenty in Africa, Saudi Arabia would be another obvious example, even South America. Only in very specific cases does anything seem to happen ... it seems to me more of a pr-campaign than an actual attempt at enforcement. Not that having zero practical use or effectiveness has ever stopped anyone from legislating, but why not legislate something equally fictional, but more fun ? Let's legislate traffic lights for faster-than-light travel ! Or let's demand something be done about fictional abuse of Indonesian babies ! Won't somebody think of the children ? Let's legislate that no-one can award the "worst dressed sentient being in the universe" prize to the same character more than 6 times in either prose or poetry. Also it seems prudent to preventively outlaw Vogon poetry. These seem like more productive endeavours.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  I agree that "making laws" isn't necessarily a solution, but it lays the foundation of future debates. This topic would no doubt involve a ton of debate and it would be VERY useful if it materializes into international law. "Why" you ask? Well because when someone violates it, there would be no question of whether this is right or wrong. We wouldn't have to go through the whole above debate all over again, just to come to a consensus that this was evil. You could just cite the law and (hopefully/in an ideal world) prosecute. Ps: They still might be able to cirumvent drone strikes by saying that by defintion of war agreed upon in the first geneva convention, it isn't war. so this rule doesn't apply. I hope they think of this when making the law
- xerophtye 13y ago
  in line with the mention of the Geneva Convention in my other post, i just remembered something. I am not sure how legally correct this is it, but someone brought it up in a Model UN that govt officials who sanction drone strikes can NOT be tried for war crimes because they aren't technically Soldiers. If this is true, wtf? The rules seriously need major revision in sight of modern tech
true_religion 13y ago
Everything about warfare has always been stacked for the rich. Honestly, how could wealth disparity exist if didn't gain the rich the power to defend their wealth against those who would want to take it?

coffeemug 13y ago

The flipside of this argument is that wars happen anyway. We might as well use the machines to save lives. (I don't necessarily believe this; I don't know what I believe, but this is the other side of the debate). The prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan happened despite the repercussions for lost sons and daughters. We're losing people right now, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives because we didn't have enough manpower (or weren't willing to take the risk) to enforce order. If we could spin up machines the way we spin up dynos, these problems would go away. No American soldiers would die. We'd spin up production and deployment to enforce near total order. We could reduce Iraqi deaths by orders of magnitude. The machines don't necessarily have to act like terminators. They could act like military police too. This might be a scary future, no doubt. But it might be a bright one too. If we trust our values and trust that our elected representatives won't go on mindless killing sprees, the machines might be a blessing in disguise. (Also note that by the time we get machines with this capability, our government, social structure, our entire economic model, and our appreciation for civil liberties will evolve quite far from where it is now too).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
grey-area 13y ago
We might as well use the machines to save lives...No American soldiers would die. We'd spin up production and deployment to enforce near total order. The mistakes made in Iraq which led to rebellion are complex, but they didn't have to do with manpower alone. Disbanding the army and most of the administration are the two largest mistakes IMO - those have nothing to with US manpower and meant a huge supply of Iraqis with nothing to lose, military training, and access to huge arms dumps. They could equally well fight and subvert machines as they could people. It's interesting the society you propose for Iraq as a bright new future - total order = totalitarian dictatorship imposed by force by a proconsul directing machines. Would you accept that for your own country? Would you rebel against it if a foreign army invaded on a pretext and occupied the country using robot warriors? We've already half-glimpsed that future with the use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen - and it isn't pretty, resulting in many more civilian deaths. I agree machine soldiers are almost inevitable, but it will not be a good thing - it'll be a further step in abstracting away warfare so that those ordering killings a world away risk nothing but money (easily reproduced) and domestic reputation (easily managed).

dba7dba 13y ago

'Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human beings' The disposable machines are built by human beings belonging to a nation (or entity) who are interested in self-preservation and protecting the nation. Of course profit doesn't hurt. Thinks about this. Lately, the rich nations are facing shortage of men willing or able to risk death/injury. The populace lacks the stomach. And the 'poorer' nations (ones with little to lose) have no qualms about bloodshed as long as they get what they want. I see drones in warfare as inevitable. How autonomous will they be? Think no one knows for sure at this point...

forktheif 13y ago

Your entire argument seems to be built around paranoid and hysteria and things you've seen in sci-fi movies. We already have drones that kill and injure human beings. They're called missiles and torpedoes, and the third world has plenty of them too. Also, there's this assumption that keeps getting made that humans will always make better decisions than machines. Personally, I think you're seriously overestimating the ability of scared, tired 18 year olds to make quick rational decisions under extreme pressure. Every single war ever, is littered with examples of human beings making mistakes, which end up with the deaths of allies or civilians, it's not even remotely rare. And you know what, machines will make mistakes too, they'll kill their own side or civilians occasionally. But after they do that, their software can be improved and refined, over and over and over, with no limit. They will constantly and forever be improved. A human soldier will not. There's only so much training you can give to someone in nine months before they're in combat. And there's also the fact that machines are a helluva a lot less likely to think it's funny to piss on a Koran or to go rape some of the locals.

xerophtye 13y ago
Interesting point. The machine soldiers would solve the problem of rampant soldiers raping locals. But if you look at drones, haven't the drones been around long enough? Their algorithm still seems to be faulty considering all the civilian casualties they have caused.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I don't think current drones are automated. They're glorified RC planes. It's still a human piloting and firing the weapons, albeit remotely.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Compared to area bombing like rolling thunder in Vietnam or Coventry or Hamburg in ww2
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    Point noted

Houshalter 13y ago

Modern warfare is already vastly stacked against the poorer side. This has arguably always been the case but it is especially true in the present with billion dollar warships and million dollar jets, missiles, satellites, etc. Not to mention nuclear missiles. Robots don't change anything. Your evil rich people can just as easily fight the rebels with human flown planes or human guided drones and paid mercenaries. And please with the "imagine a robot shooting a kid, we can't ever allow that to happen" hypothetical. Soldiers kill innocent people all the time, just on accident. Missiles miss, land mines get abandoned and kill innocent kids, warfare has never been tame. A robot would arguably be better because it might rarely if ever miss, it could have better vision than a human, it could possibly be a better judge than even a human with sufficient AI, and it never gets emotional, angry, or tired or insane.

xerophtye 13y ago
> it could possibly be a better judge than even a human Well then what aout all the children killed by drones[1]? [1] http://droneswatch.org/2013/01/20/list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen/ http://droneswatch.org/2013/01/20/list-of-children-killed-by...
- yohui 13y ago
  This is the second time in this thread that you've brought up the shortcomings of current drones as evidence against the use of future robots. And it's the second you've conflated human-operated drones, possessed of little intelligence or ability to learn, with hypothetical fully-autonomous robots. Would these robots behave better than humans or human-controlled drones? That remains to be seen. But the emphasized shortcomings of current aerial drones are about as relevant to future aerial robots as RC toys are to self-deiving cars. (Much less future ground-based robots, which in uncertain situations might be able to choose a third option besides "shoot to kill" or "fly away".)
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Those kids were killed by people radio-controlling bombs, not by autonomous drones. On the other hand, how many civilians, including kids, have been killed by troops on the ground for motivations such as rape, boredom or robbery? Robots wouldn't have this motivation for useless/counterproductive violence, but some human soldiers unavoidably do.

briandear 13y ago

Right because if we ban it nobody will use it. Great idea!

polymatter 13y ago
well, its worked with nukes so far (mostly).
- rainmaking 13y ago
  Because those who have nukes conveniently forbid their further proliferation.

Joeri 13y ago

Even if people are manning the drones, you could have one person handling thousands of drones, and just being offered a long series of yes/no prompts ("Shoot here?"). As long as there is any way for a country to decide to deploy drones they will find a way to comply with the letter of whatever restrictions you put in place. The drones are perhaps a good opportunity to look at the broader picture. Maybe we need to recognize that one country sending weapons and troops into another country on their own initiative is a fundamental violation of human rights and basic morality. The only way troops or weapons should be deployed is to stop greater harm from happening, and the only entity that can judge the greater harm is one that looks beyond national borders. For me the simplest way to "clean up" war is to make all war illegal, and only allow troop and weapon deployments outside of a country's own national borders under the UN banner for peacekeeping purposes. This sidesteps the rich kids vs poor kids issue because there is no us vs them, there is only the global community and how it polices itself. Not that the UN is necessarily ready for such a thing, but even in its inadequate capacity it would be a whole lot better than the horrible inhumane mess we are in right now.

JulianMorrison 13y ago
Yeah. Watch a pro playing starcraft. Keyboard and mouse, selecting and directing, almost faster than the eye can follow. This group of terminators, attack here. That group, charge the bunker over there.
- rainmaking 13y ago
  Modern army control systems are already a lot like starcraft, even up to the progress bars that get shorter and change color as tank crew members get killed.

Shivetya 13y ago

Tell me how well that ban on chemical and biological weapons is working out. Lets be honest about it, the art has to be advanced in countries where it might be consider abhorrent to engage in such combat just to insure that when the other guy does use it it can be defended against. Automation is coming whether we like it or not. If we end up with a world were large armies are no longer fielded and only robots exist on the combat field perhaps we can move weapons to those that incapacitate instead of kill. We can only get there is we continue to push development. Regardless, strikes will become more surgical which could reduce casualties amongst non combatants. Figure it this way, if they become good enough maybe the leaders will be the ones looking over THEIR shoulders.

scotty79 13y ago

I find it insane that human with AK47 still poses any threat in the warzone. I look forward to the times when human with small arms has absolutely no value on the battlefield. War should be only for the richest kids.