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Comment by merely-unlikely | Hacker News Reader

On your point about land mines, antipersonnel variants have actually been banned by the UN for a while now - "Anti-personnel landmines are prohibited under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (or Mine Ban Convention), adopted in 1997."[1] As you say, the ethics debate isn't really new.

[1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/landmines/

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Yeah, but I think historically that's going to be an anomaly brought on by the unipolar moment of US/Western military dominance, not a moment of ethical enlightenment. The US and its allies were so dominant that they didn't really need landmines to win anymore, and landmines are one of the cheapest effective deterrents their potential enemies could use. So it became yet another requirement for acceptance into the "rules based order" that just coincidentally benefits those enforcing the rules over those who have a different ethical perspective.

I'm not saying we should bring landmines back, but "human in the loop" AI warfare will only work so long as our AI maintains the same relative military dominance we've enjoyed for the last few decades. The moment an AI squadron gets wiped out because the human approval couldn't come fast enough, it'll go right out the window.

> The US and its allies were so dominant that they didn't really need landmines to win anymore, and landmines are one of the cheapest effective deterrents their potential enemies could use.

If the US doesn't need landmines, why won't the US ban them? The United States is one of the nations that hasn't signed the Ottawa Treaty?

The US does need landmines. Obama and Biden both committed to reducing America's use of landmines, but both made an exemption for use in Korea.

That statement should more accurately target "US allies". The US is at the top of the system and can largely do whatever it wants, no one's going to slap sanctions on us over landmines. However our (western allies) strength gives our allies the confidence they need to voluntarily give them up, and we can coerce other nations to give them up to be part of our club.

It's all a power play at the end of the day, the ethical argument is window dressing. Some people take window dressing very seriously, but don't mistake that for being the decisive factor in policy.

Both sides in Ukraine are using a ton of land mines both antipersonnel and antitank. When push comes to shove if the weapon achieves some well identified goal well it will be used.

Neither the US, Russia nor China has signed on with the Ottawa Treaty.

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