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Comment by epoxyhockey | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to take an optimistic stance on this topic and say that war technology evolves; we shouldn't be scared of it just because it was sci-fi 10 years ago. I think the development of the nuclear bomb was more scary than some line-manufactured drones.

Yes, Obama has been awfully militant lately. He may have thought that it was the best thing he could do in an attempt to get positive approval ratings from the general public. Killing an American citizen w/o trial may have gone too far, even for middle America.

The drone arms race is going to be an economical one. And, given the state of the world economy, no country is going to spend billions of dollars on a drone war anytime soon.

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Drones are far cheaper then other options.

I'm taking a pessimistic view. When the costs of war are externalized (as they are now and will be even more so with drones and robots) we no lose the incentives to not have war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

"It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee

Fighting war with robots resembles video games. Everyone associates video games with fun. Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it.

One of the reasons why the co-op portion of Portal 2 uses robots as player characters is that the designers knew that these characters would die frequently. In order to keep the E10+ rating and in order to quell any outrage, the designers used robots that are not even vaguely human in shape aside from the fact that they are bipedal. TVtropes calls the effect "Slapstick Sociopathy."

I disagree. Nuclear bombs are a "drop and forget" kind of munition. Killing people with drones is similar in that your side doesn't face much danger. But, once you show a picture of a city completely destroyed and skin melting off of the bodies of your enemies, the general public will determine that war is terrible.

I wonder how long it will be until the pilots and support staff of these drones start getting car-bombs or some nasty surprises in the mail.

The argument that they're engaging a legitimate military target and not responding indiscriminately makes it pretty hard to call it 'terrorism', although I'm sure they'll be 'unlawful combatants' as long as it benefits those fighting them.

By moving actual soldiers off the front line and having them control proxy weaponry, the force asymmetry is being increased even further. Anyone fighting against it will have no real choice but to strike at those doing the controlling.

I'm not exactly disagreeing, just noting that I read the opposite recently:

"Even though home and wife are just a few minutes’ drive down the road from his battle station, the peculiar detachment of drone warfare does not necessarily insulate Martin from his actions. Predator attacks are extraordinarily precise, but the violence of war can never be fully tamed, and the most gripping scenes in the book document Martin’s emotions on the occasions when innocent civilians wander under his crosshairs in the seconds just before his Hellfire missile arrives on target. Allied bomber pilots in World War II killed millions of civilians but rarely had occasion to experience the results on the ground. Drone operators work with far greater accuracy, but the irony of the technology is that its operators can see their accidental victims—two little boys and their shattered bikes, in one especially heartrending case Martin describes—in excruciating detail. Small wonder that studies by the military have shown that UAV operators sometimes end up suffering the same degree of combat stress as other warfighters."

It's from this review:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/predato...

of P.W. Singer's recent book.

Martins emotions pale compared to those of the innocent civilians that are no longer around.

Personally I'm happy that there is at least some cost to this but I don't think the cost is quite high enough to prevent a runaway use of this horrible technology.

If I were asked to help design/build such a system I would point blank refuse. I'm sure that some other person would step in to fill the vacancy with a smile on their face but I strongly believe that we all have a personal responsibility in what we help create and I don't see any of the users of these systems with the ability to create their own. It takes a lot of tech to launch a missile by remote control from a plane controlled from a large distance with any accuracy.

The people that built this probably sleep just fine but imo they have blood on their hands. And don't give me that 'guns don't kill people' nonsense, if you make weapons for the military you carry your bit.

Being a pascifist is a luxury that cannot necessarily be afforded by everyone. Competition is an inextricable part of life, and military force still trumps most other forms of competition as a last resort. The next disruption in military technology has arrived, and those that dominate this type of warfare will likely dominate future battles, just as the American air force has allowed the American military to dominate since WW2. I wish it weren't so, but having a strong military is still important, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. If you're not the strongest, and you're not friends with the strongest, you lose a lot of self determinism. So, it's important that we focus on making the best unmanned combat vehicles possible, if only to be able to maintain the luxury of pacifism, because people in other countries don't necessarily share your moral qualms.

I'm not a pacifist. You hit me I hit back. But I decide that on a case-by-case basis and to give others the ability to indiscriminately kill people that I have no beef with sounds like a very bad idea.

Collateral damage is such a terrible term.

Even pacifists will prepare for war to have peace.

I agree with the sentiment. I work on computer vision systems that have application to this area and there's a line beyond which I won't go. I'm not sure where it is exactly. For instance, there are researchers working on human detection for these systems, which can have applications in attacking and in avoiding; the tech is independent of intent.

IMHO the discipline of robotics is facing some of the same agonizing choices that atomic physics faced in the 1930s-1960s. The moral dimension of their work took the physicists largely by surprise. It would be a naive roboticist who did not see the same questions coming this time.

> Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it.

I think you only have to modernize and mechanize warfare to the point that wars are fought and the horrors experienced by a sufficiently small minority of the populace. That is I think if there is some threshold, in America we've already surpassed it and war has become no longer terrible to us; future technological advances aren't required.

There are teenagers today who can only remember living in the america of this abstract war narrative, yet who have lived in a world completely untouched by it: no death, no fear, no butter rations, no wrapping bandages for the troops, no shared purpose, no end in site. Perpetual war is reality, and as this financial crisis seems to be illustrating, is also the priority.

>lived in a world completely untouched by it

War has certainly touched the U.S. youth as we've seen massive internal shifts on personal liberty (e.g. TSA, security guards in school, signs in public transport that ask you to monitor your fellow citizens). The youth is also clearly able to see that the U.S. spends a disproportionate amount on the military rather than enriching it's own culture and people's lives. Much like the Occupy Wallstreet movement I would expect to see a call, by the upcoming generation, to demand that their birthright is not continued to be sucked dry by the military.

Spike Jonze's short film "Scenes from the suburbs" is an insightful example of how we might imagine a further deepening militarization of the U.S. Sadly it does not seem so far fetched to me.

May have been too far? So assassination of own citizens is more or less fine now?

Unfortunately (and without any sarcasm) the answer is yes if youre American. But there are a few more countries where it's ok too. Russia and the polonium saga springs to mind, although responsibility wasn't claimed unlike the UAV hit. Any other recent citizen assassinations spring to mind? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvin...

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