As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
All things drone, killer or otherwise
glimmung
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There was too much drone talk in the the presidential election thread, so I created this to bleed off some of the OT discussion.
I unfortunately don't have the time to make a really well researched header, but I will edit it later.
I unfortunately don't have the time to make a really well researched header, but I will edit it later.
0
Posts
Wait, are you Fuckin kidding me? Can I get an article link?
whoops this was a year ago
I should read better
(If you get motion sickness, best get a bucket ready to watch the vids their all mostly FPV)
There are also some serious moral issues with that argument. If it's morally critical that our soldiers suffer and die during wars we start, wouldn't it be just as moral to switch over to drones for combat but keep up the cost to human life by randomly executing our own soldiers?
I swear there was a sci-fi story where military aircraft were required by treaty to have a live crew. The "pilot" had no agency and was there purely to make sure nations had to count a cost. Pretty sure the crew was not even concious during combat.
Reminds me of a classic Star Trek episode where there's the computer that simulates wars and decides who dies--and then they actually are painlessly executed.
There was also a Star Trek episode about it. Tired of actually blowing up their own planet, everyone decided to have simulated bombs and reported to death chambers if the computer decided they were 'hit'.
I think this is wrong on 2 fronts.
First, is that the argument doesn't fly in the face of history. The US pulled out of Mogadishu after taking 19 casualties. The US and the USSR both pulled out of Vietnam/Afghanistan after deciding the cost to keep fighting there was prohibitively high-the US took 58,000 KIA in Vietnam, the north took 1,100,000 Saigon doesn't fall if the US keeps fighting. Most wars involving developed nations post WWII are not existential wars, they are wars of choice. Why didn't the US invade Iran or do combat ops in Syria? The limiting cost of modern conflicts is political currency-how many times have we armed conflicts sold on explicit "No boots on the ground" rules- and losing soldiers is the biggest drain on that.
Second
Drones aren't just a improved rifle, or better body armor. They allow an entire new set of actions, that are of dubious effectiveness and cause substantial collateral damage. It's not a choice between mounting a maned standing air patrol over Somalia and NW Pakistan and Yemen and wherever else, and using that to shoot missiles at poorly verified targets of opportunity or doing the same with drones. Because mounting the air patrol would be an insane demand on even the US's resources, for minimal or negative gain.
Would the US never launch a strike with normal planes or cruise missiles using bad intelligence that ends up blowing up a wedding, no that could still happen. But when you are constantly prowling around with a hammer in your hand, you're going to pound a lot more "nails".
You're not arguing against hammers, you're arguing for shittier hammers. Shitty hammers bend more nails and break more wood.
Sometimes living in the future has its downsides.
Everything getting easier includes wars getting easier.
This same argument definitely could be made about guns and explosives.
They make killing people way too easy. Before guns and firearms you needed like training and physical might to kill people. Now it's as easy as click, bang, dead.
Again cat's out of the bag, and barring us giving up the hegemony no one is going to try to make international laws or accords to try to stop us using the drones. Most specifically because we are taking care of their problems with these drones.
Even more to the point, no one will make laws against drones because everyone wants to use them. Because they make the risk to soldiers lives pretty minimal.
Not if you aren't hammering everything in sight because "Hey I got this easy to use hammer in my belt loop".
In this analogy the United States is a carpenter. Shit's gonna get hammered one way or the other. The only question is whether we go with ball peen or jack.
Right now, potential loss of (mostly American) life does dissuade us from getting involved in more conflicts. Not as well as it should in my opinion, but it does.
It's kind of a moot point now though, since I fail to see any way to stop us (and anyone else) from using drones. It's not like the UN can declare them a war-crime and enforce their non-use.
Besides, proper use could result in less collateral damage than our current 'non-boots on the ground' tactics.
Loss of US military personel does not dissuade us from bombing countries. I can't think of any place that is not being bombed by both manned and unmanned aircraft. Nothing we attack has contested airspace aside from maybe Pakistan.
In a thread long gone, possibly on USEnet even(!), someone described the Terminator(s) as "the ultimate development of the sniper rifle."
And from a webcomic:
"You really don't want something designed solely to kill humans to have the capacity to get bored."
The concern would be that if you've got a plain old boring hammer or Homer Simpson's revolutionary hammer that does all the work for you, maybe it's easier to send the hammer out to blow people up and you get less and less sensitive to whether you should do it.
IIRC, they've been finding drone pilots suffer the same rates of PTSD and such as regular pilots? So on a person to person basis, the action of using a drone to kill someone still carries the same weight. It's just a scary notion that the risk might be removed from any cost-benefit analysis when making military decisions. But I dunno, maybe that's not even a thing now?
Also, look up UAV Blackwing when you get a chance, for an idea of what subs are experimenting with.
When the Obama administration's murderous "drone war" in northern Pakistan was at its height, my position was pretty anti-drone (at least armed drones) without much nuance. Now I sorta think that's like attempting to stop the tide from coming in - if a technology can improve your military effectiveness or reduce the cost of warfare, you're gonna use that technology. And even if you don't, everybody else will. I still think the drone war in Pakistan was awful, but that's an objection to policy, not to technology - many of us hate what Saudis doing in Yemen, but most aren't writing jeremiads against F-16s.
But I do think the low-cost warfare enabled by modern technology poses its own problems. People on the right (mainly) like to complain about how Obama's been reticent to use military force, but that's a load of bollocks - under Obama we've been at varying levels of war in tons of countries, from the larger engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria to smaller engagements in Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. People who make that criticism just don't understand modern warfare, or at least pretend not to for political reasons. Drones and air strikes and special forces are how the US fights now, especially since we're mainly fighting non-state actors and insurgencies with whom the US has a massive force disparity. So we can fight quiet wars that never make it to the headlines - most Americans don't really know who we're fighting or where at this point, and most don't really care.
Also, DRONES WITH HANDS:
Fixed for the real future.
But this makes it all better
Can it twirl a mustache with those arms?
"Those fools at the university won't be sitting so pretty without their chairs!
*swoop*
Nyah-ha-ha-ha"
The question this raises, though, is why exactly war is bad in the first place. Many traditional anti-war arguments kinda fall by the wayside at the point where technology allows for "wars" that use very few actual soldiers to kill very few people. You can argue that the US should not be doing foreign policy in this manner, or that it doesn't have the right on the international stage to take these actions; but in terms of the full scope of the human effort to curb the immense toll of war, these current conflicts are arguably a spilled glass of water compared to a tsunami. Perhaps that drastic reduction in the scope of harm should be, if not celebrated, at least respected; and perhaps our tools for fighting to reduce these new conflicts should be different from those that have been used against war in the past.
Then once that's done, remove the robotic side too and all future wars will be fought in PVP multiplayer games?
(And then, of course, there's Robot Jox.)
"What happens when one side runs out of robots?"
"...oh.
They lose!
DARPA is skipping the "P" part:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/2/12358322/darpa-cyber-grand-challenge-ai-hacking-defcon
There's a Culture book that touches on it.
Turns out people start getting thrown in to the woodchipper that's war.
This seems to make the absurd assumption that the people we are bombing with drones are being harmed less than they otherwise would be.
There is almost no point in sending out drones to fight other drones.
You would attack valuable targets. People and resources. The enemy's will and ability to continue to make war.
Drones will just make it cost less to attack, and do little to change the cost of a failed defense.
As I've actually mentioned this a few times in the past, but do you know the United States government has mathematically-driven killer drone program that uses equations--bad equations at that--combined with metadata harvested from cell phones to decide which people to kill with missiles? And that drones are, naturally, the crux of it?
And, presumably for the sheer irony of it, the name of this program is SKYNET.
It is, in effect, killing people via metadata--and by the estimation of the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group, "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit" metadata. It operates in Pakistan because, frankly, there aren't many governments in the world where a automated killer drone program isn't considered an act of war or worse, but Islamabad is one of them.
The process, naturally, is classified, but as best as we know the data criteria is used to decide whether or not an individual is put on a kill list, which in turn is personally approved by the Untied States president every week. Moral complications aside, the mechanical failures of the program are illustrated when an Al-Jazeera correspondent was simultaneously identified as being a member of both the Mulsim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda (two groups targeted by the program, and at war with one another). Drones are only half the equation--presumably when you're operating a literal killer attack robot program, you want to streamline the process as much as humanly possible, lest someone in the process realize how batshit crazy the whole system sounds on its face, much less under investigation. It also is augmented by the Obama government's tendency to publicly and retroactively label male teenage or older some classification of valid target if they were killed via drone, regardless of anything else (if I'm not mistaken, the Bush government pioneered this same PR tactic too, but they simply made use of fewer drones)--American drones have been used in Pakistan since at least 2004, though why SKYNET's founding isn't publicly known (as far as I know), it does originate under the Obama government.
The program could certainly function without drones--and would still be quite disturbing, at the least--but it seemed topical. In the strictest sense, the equations are actually fairly harmless, it's the drones themselves who do the extrajudicial killing-via-robot.
An interesting question (as someone not in the drones' target area, because then it becomes a bit more than interesting) is if we'd be using such a half-assed target identification system as Skynet if we had to use (and risk) people on the ground to hit the targets.
And I remember reading up on Skynet a bit, there wasn't much about it that wasn't horrible.