January 19, 2009

Towards a 'largely robotic' battlefield




Proxy killing




Better than humans



Failure to override




Removing the human factor



When war becomes too easy


Singer's prognosis is grim:
We're heading down a very strange and treacherous path.


The Missed Call Of Cthulhu said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nato Welch said...

I'm long on the record about the political dangers of war drones, but I don't think the real danger is in the judgment of most Americans once the costs of war and lives and treasure falls. Rather, it's in the judgment of the very few Americans who will be tempted to use them to fight wars in secrecy.

You see, I've got that YouTube thing at my house, too, and the only "war porn" I've really seen on it so far wasn't made by elite snipers or gunship crews showing off how cool they and their toys are; they're things like backfired Israeli TV broadcasts featuring parents bemoaning the loss of their families to shelling.

Eliminating casualties on your side doesn't reduce the true cost of war. It simply eliminates a distraction we used to have for ignoring the "costs" one inflicts on the other side. That's a lot more difficult to hide than it used to be.

Radek Pilich said...

This makes me thinking, whether the next generation of army professionals will be recruited from growing group of professional computer gamers.

Russell Blackford said...

I need to think a lot more about this issue, but I do find myself sceptical when I come across a lot of left-leaning angst about the increasing power of machine systems like this (I don't mean in this forum).

Often, it seems to me that the people making the criticism are motivated by a pacifism/distaste for warfare (which is fair enough) that will lead them to want to criticise any advances in military technology, even advances that may actually reduce the suffering and loss of life on both sides of a military conflict.

Admittedly, the development of more and more powerful military technologies may have a downside. It just might make wars seem more tempting to the nation or coalition with the superior technology. It might well encourage the nations or other groups with inferior technology to rely on asymmetric methods that may breed greater fanaticism and involve more act-by-act cruelty.

Still, my hunch is that these technologies are likely to be desirable on balance, because they are likely to reduce rather than increase the total suffering in the world, as well as increasing the ability of nations that are more-or-less progressive to defend themselves from some kinds of enemies.

At the same time, their development in some form is probably inevitable. It's futile, and probably not even reasonable, to ask the Western powers not to develop technologies that promise to give them a military edge. The question is how we can avoid a situation where the inevitable availability of this kind of technology leads to greater suffering in the world in the form of wars that would otherwise not happen. I tend to think that that will have to be done by mechanisms other than trying to reliquish or impede the development of the technologies, though there may be some specific technologies that we should not develop (because of the suffering they could cause or their lack of discrimination, for example). As so often, it looks to me as if the devil is likely to be in the detail.

Troy said...

--Robert E. Lee