https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughte...
"Not even the evidence of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, with its long sieges and trench warfare—an eerie predictor of World War I’s horrors to come—could persuade military observers of the Maxim gun’s lethality on the modern battlefield."
Kind of like how the queen in chess may not take many pieces. She is easily the most powerful piece, and as a result a very credible threat. As a result she can be used to project threats rather than taking pieces.
By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units.
Even worse than that, there is also the well documented history of the Cold War, where nuclear war and MAD was only spared because there were individual low level officers that exercised a humane criteria and knowingly disobeyed protocol. If robots would have been in charge of nuclear defense systems during those years, we probably would not been here discussing this.
On the other hand, robots would also complicate things for the not-honorable superiors -- for one, they'll lose an option to give verbal orders and then claim no knowledge and blame subordinates when things come out -- they would now need to alter electronic records.
But my point is just that the effect of higher robot involvement is far from clear.
> and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units.
[0] Perhaps through cryptographically one-way neurolinguistic re-programming. Even Japan's conditioning by the American occupation (one of the most brutal cultural reorganizes absent enforced diaspora) seems to be waning after 70 years.
You're thinking like a nice person, which is the wrong approach here.
What you should be doing is, think of it as if you were Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Okay? You're Stalin. And now you're thinking "hmmm, how could I use these shiny new toys, I wonder?..."
It's not the best case scenario you should worry about, it's the other end of the stick. Security 101.
(Unless, of course, your whole post was sarcastic, in which case nevermind.)
Drones will be deployed in situations where human based intervention would otherwise be a political non-option, thus creating collateral damage where there otherwise would be none.
The cold truth is that an algorithm chooses the where (based on automatically collected and analyzed metadata no less!) a machine relays the commands, an interface displays the target coordinates and then the human obeys.
In any case, this article is not about merits of drones per se, just about the self-targeting ones. So when you say that "an algorithm chooses the where" -- any reference for that?
Surely you don't think they have gymnasiums full of junior analysts trying to manually correlate phone call metadata? At some level an algorithm decides someone specific crosses the probability threshold for our definition of "terrorist" and it's all rubber stamps from there until the hellfire blows up a wedding[1], funeral[2] or hospital[3].
[1]: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/21/turning_a_wedding_into...
[2]: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/dro...
[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/world/asia/doctors-without...
I suspect this is also the case for [3], however they are unlikely to own up to that publicly
We often mark the fall of a regime at the point where its army and secret police take off their uniforms, climb down from the guard towers, and join the protest crowd (or go home). Robots can remain loyal to the central command structure to the very end.
Human police forces are liable to defect if not paid, likely to refuse suicidal engagements, and may even refuse immoral engagements. With good enough engineering, a regime's drones will remain ruthlessly efficient even when it runs out of money, is obviously on the wrong side of history, and is obviously going to lose.
I'm not sure whether the final outcomes of revolutions would change, but their endings will certainly be longer and more painful. A Berlin Wall capable of defending itself indefinitely without human intervention would not have fallen so easily.
Hmm, they can just shield the control modules (cpu and memory). And use optical storage or similar for large amounts of data and basic programming.
Also, EMPs usually last only a couple of seconds and can only be effective in a small area. Maybe the robots can just reboot and wait for a valid command a few seconds later by some flying drone.
I thought it was one of Stanislaw Lem's novels, but can't find the name now; I might be wrong about that.
For another perspective on autonomous drones read Robert Sheckley's Watchbird.
Edit: The Defenders, which became The Penultimate Truth.