They're in luck, because as long as there are people who aren't born into means there will be a steady supply of people who choose to join the military over other pursuits.
You can't manufacture military drones by the millions.
It's also failing to actually realize military objectives. The problem isn't delivering bullets or explosives to the target, it's finding the target in the first place.
Drone surveillance is a much bigger threat than killer drones. You are more likely to be thrown into prison because of drone technology than being killed.
This could be a positive. It will create a disincentive for people to pursue political power or to get any kind of public attention. Anyone who draws attention to themselves could become a target. Control over the bot armies is likely to change hands frequently until they become fully autonomous and wipe us all out.
While I understand the sentiment, the problem is that abstaining from weapons research due to moral qualms leads to the least moral being the most well armed.
There is a remorseless logic in a race to the bottom, though.
Anyone who eschews development of such military system risks becoming a toy of those who went all in.
The Armenians just lost a lot of territory in Nagorno Karabakh they considered their own - to an enemy who had suicide drones. Their country wasn't exactly big even before that loss.
Fifty other nations in potentially similar position looked at that war and its outcome. I doubt that their decisions were "let us stay moral and possibly be next on the chopping block".
>The Armenians just lost a lot of territory in Nagorno Karabakh they considered their own - to an enemy who had suicide drones.
IMHO while it's true their enemy had 'suicide drones' (which are actually loitering munitions, but 'suicide' makes it sound so much more evil) that wasn't a deciding factor - they also had Turkish drones that didn't require self detonation to work.
Azerbaijan put a lot of videos on youtube showing them bombing and pursuing groups of Armenian soldiers with those drones, not the suicide drones. The suicide drones were anti material weapons against mobile air defense and other harder targets.
The azeris even used old (trash) AN-2's turned into drones to get a response from Armenian air defense systems so that loitering munitions like the herop could identity air defense systems with minimal danger.
We are already in this race. Everyone is, even if they won't acknowledge it. Without anti air/anti drone technology no ground force is safe. This isn't new or unique to drones - it's the truth of every war where air dominance occurs.
In the Six Day War Israel destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground in its opening strike, and when Egypt tried to retreat from the Sinai they used their air force to bomb the retreating units with impunity. The remnants of Egypt's air force couldn't fight against an intact air force so they flew support sorties but were overall ineffective. No drones required. It's just gotten cheaper to do.
Like with the prisoners' dilemma, what's "logical" in a one-time two-player game isn't true for a multi-round multi-player game.
If the Meanie Republic uses Agony Clouds against the citizens of Goodistan, the rest of the world notices. Maybe the Meanie Republic completely wins and even annexes Goodistan, but the bystander countries are going to take Meanie atrocities into account when deciding how to interact with that state.
True, but the trouble is, use of killer robots or suicide drones does not lead to spectacular atrocities. Much like targeted advertising, it works in a pinpoint fashion.
So the moral outrage is likely to be absent, at least compared to things like flattening of Rotterdam by Luftwaffe or Rape of Nanking.
Land mines exist for a reason, as weapons, they have advantages and disadvantages.
The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if your enemy (or your friends, or civilians, or large dogs, or cattle) enter the minefield, they're going to die or at least be mutilated.
Obviously, some of that is disadvantage. The biggest disadvantage is that they're cheap, and buried in the ground, so it's tempting to leave them there, especially if you happen to lose the conflict. So they continue to kill people long after there are no enemies left.
Automated gunbots have the same advantage as landmines. They share a shade of the minor disadvantage, namely they can't reliably tell enemies from friendlies or civilians. But neither can a grunt in a machine gun emplacement.
They are expensive, and above the ground, so there's no world in which civilian children, years after the conflict, are shot to death while playing in a field.
So if these are the "next landmine" I say: good. We would all love to live in the world in which there is no war, but, we don't. Until we do, we will need the weapons of war.
In a vacuum, with perfectly spherical frictionless humans, sure.
In the world we live in, a technology which replaces landmines, and kills fewer noncombatants, is an improvement which results in less civilian death. That's moral in my playbook.
Moral would be not killing other humans for power, resources, etc. I'm comfortable with my beliefs, and I understand your position as well. I personally understand the need for a military, but there are some weapons I wouldn't have been comfortable using when I was a military officer. Luckily, I have no part in those decisions today and I can share my beliefs without any risk to anyone else, "enemy" or otherwise.
You can use this line of thinking to justify any war crime that doesn't involve killing the adversary. "Well, we could've just killed them, better we dragged them to a black site to be tortured instead."
A scenario where Palestinians are permanently blinded for approaching the prison fences in Gaza or elsewhere is honestly horrifying.
I think it needs to be considered why the Geneva convention was held, because it was now possible to kill or injure in ways never thought possible before. I don't think they've stood the test of time though, if things like drone strikes and AI weaponry are allowed. I would rather combatants be blinded than gunned down by a terminator. Istm like prohibition of violence against non combatants is orthogonal to the means.
> Article 1 of the 1995 Protocol IV to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons provides:
> It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.
It seems pretty obvious to me this is a slippery slope, and humans won't be in the loop forever. When you're already using weapons to kill your enemies, it's pretty easy to justify killing them easier when your goal is just to kill them already. It even gives them plausible deniability over individual deaths (not that it should, but it will).
There's a funny Asimov short story about improving technology for guided missiles. The solution: put a pilot in each guided missle. The entire story is tongue-in-cheek, but characterizes the ebb and flow between ethics and military technology.
I didn't know about the story yet, but the reality was already very close to that terrible scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349
(One of the launch sites is quite close to where I live)
If people are interested, the story is “The Feeling of Power” [0]. I remember reading this as a child and feeling a profound feeling of sadness. Now I tell myself I’m older and more cynical, but being reminded of it brought a rush of those feelings back... human memory is a strange thing.
How is it more dignified to have another human decide to kill you? It seems just as undignified to have a human with agency disregard your well being in a way which is indistinguishable from an automated killing.
It is said that Al Saladin, upon learning that Richard Lionheart’s horse had died in battle had the best horse in his own stalls sent to his opponent as a gift.
It would appear that Saladin held King Richard in high esteem (he was brutal to those he did not)
Compare that behavior with our drones and F-16 raining death from the safety of miles of distance, and you see how pusillanimous we’ve become. Im sure NPR will wax poetically about drone operator’s PTSD, but it’s not PTSD what they suffer from for there was no trauma. It’s shame, guilt and disgust.
In the Christian West we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war. We sought to emulate him, added his behavior to our codes of chivalry. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that future generations will spit on the memory of our generals loosing wars from the safety of telework.
> it’s not PTSD what they suffer from for there was no trauma. It’s shame, guilt and disgust.
Given PTSD manifests in people who have never killed and is not restricted to soldiers (e.g. victims of sexual assault and traffic accidents [1]), this claim is unsubstantiated.
> we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war
You’re transporting values from a zero-growth world, where war was practically the only route to advancement, to a positive-growth one. War was honourable when it was necessary. It is no longer necessary. The era of celebrating our enemies has long passed. (That is why everything is now framed in terms of defense.)
“ Given PTSD manifests in people who have never killed and is not restricted to soldiers”
PTSD is the last of a long list of euphemisms used to describe shell shock. To make war more palpable. Eventually the shrinks added all the bad life experiences as causes of PTSD. To dilute the unique horror of war.[1]
Therefore, today a guy who sees his best friend blow up next to him from landmine, or a solder who witnesses one of our “friend and ally” rape a boy [2] has the same diagnosis as someone who got into a car accident.
Even the fact that PTSD is not a word but an acronym oozes with our degeneracy and America’s military bureaucracy in particular.
“You’re transporting values from a zero-growth world, where war was practically the only route to advancement, to a positive-growth one.”
Or maybe our forefathers weren’t as obsessed with
careerism and advancement as we are today? Never mind that those who waged war were born into the highest class so there was little to advance (King Richard Lionheart was King!)
Anyway, we get to pass on higher values because we’re rich? So values are ephemeral not universal? If values are not universal I’ll take the gallantry of the crusaders who mourned their valiant enemies over the moral emptiness of our generals. (And what do these generals have to show for their moral laxity? A long string of defeat. These generals are, as Trump pointed out, losers)
Nor does it appear to be true that we became dishonorable when we became a growth society. There are a great many examples of men acting with honor in the world wars, and we certainly were a growth obsessed industrialized society then! [3]
And the whole argument that war was necessary then, it isn’t now is just not true.
War was as necessary then as it is today. Which is to say not much. Read the old philosophers, Church fathers, the Bhagavad Gita etc, the Chinese sages, and the futility of war is expressed unambiguously. How many ancient texts throughout all Eurasian cultures caution the ruler against war?
No, it is us that are dishonorable, not the age we live in. The Persians returned Leonidas’ body for burial [4]. Obama dumped Bin Laden’s body overboard and lied that he gave him a Muslim burial.
By not treating our brothers in arms with dignity and honor we have become degenerates.
[1] War is uniquely horrible because, when conducted dishonorably it embraces all other horrors.
[2] Afghanistan
[3] my favorite story is of a German pilot in WW2 who didn’t finish off a plane that he had crippled. Instead he escorted it back to the channel. The two pilots eventually met after the war and the German said that that action had saved his humanity.
[4] Xerxes was known for his anger and he uncharacteristically (for the Persians) kept the body to deny it burial. 40 years later, the Persians restored their honor and returned it.
> The turrets feature heavy duty 7.62 calibre machine guns tied into a network spanning the entire border. If any turret detects human movement, the entire chain of guns can train their sights and concentrate firepower on the interloper. Some turrets are also able to fire explosive rockets.
> With such overlapping fields of fire, even heavily armored vehicles would be quickly eliminated. The effect on a human body would be overwhelming, disproportionately violent, and would leave little in the way of human remains.
You can tell this is not written by a person with any military knowledge or with an agenda against weapons.
Non peaceful borders have been manned with such weapons operated by humans for more than a century (in the case of machine guns). And generally, if you can shoot one bullet and kill someone, you don’t use keep shoot hundreds of bullets, and if you can stop a threat with bullets, you don’t launch a rocket at it.
Israel doesn’t launch rockets at people next to the border. And tries to avoid killing unarmed people (for example by aiming for the legs). I assume every sane military does the same. Killing unarmed people, besides obviously being immoral, is bad strategically as well.
(This comment deals with a specific paragraph, and not the actual interesting issue raised by this article, which is not unique to Israel I presume, and is practiced by all military industries capable of building such weapons today)
EDIT: well, I had it coming. I didn’t mean for it to become the classic Israel vs Palestinians flame war - just wanted to point out the realities of borders, wars and weapons which I suspect most HN readers are not exposed to. But again, I should have seen this coming. :(
It's fine that you adopt a definition of murder which means that absolutely clear-cut self defense (someone comes at you with a knife, you pick up a nearby wine bottle and clock them on the head, they die) is murder, it's your prerogative.
The rest of us will ignore you, however. Personally I think your definition is evil, not just wrong.
This seems like a clear example of a case where the culprit did not intend for the other person to die. Rather, they wanted to neutralize the threat by the means at their disposal, and the person's death was a side-effect.
I respectfully disagree, Israel is an occupation force, has overwhelming power (military, economical and diplomatic) and they do kill grown people and children almost without prejudice. Some official numbers (I suspect it is even worse in reality):
P.S.
I don't condone violence on both sides, eternal war like one in Palestine/Israel is horrible (I've lived through 4 years of war, believe me a day of it is too much), but I really don't like political correctness, where we must have "balance" in reporting, but it is completely clear who holds the keys of peace and who has the finger on the trigger)
What part of this link proves Israel is not trying to avoid casualties?
At no point I’m saying there’s not casualties, including civilian casualties, including horrible mistakes, including trigger happy psychos that make it through the ranks.
But the imbalance of casualties is the result of Israel being better at it.
It would be great if there was peace. But even if I ran Israel and the Palestinian Territories as a dictatorship tomorrow I still wouldn’t be able to turn all violence to zero.
Personally, as an Israeli I would love for Israel to evacuate settlements. But pretending that would bring peace is not even naive, it just doesn’t align with anything anyone involved is saying.
That’s one twisted way to interpret it. A more charitable one would be that Israel is better at protecting its civilians.
It sounds as if you have an idea that Israel could just make it all go away in a day if they’d like. I would love to know what you think that move would be.
Well, for one it should (at least try to) protect all civilians not just "its own".
I agree with you that no one can make it go away in a day, and that is a big problem. Every day of the conflict causes more pain, more casualties, and expands vicious circle of violence.
I guess that current generations are lost cause, as long as we always frame it into "us vs them", "we are good, enemy is bad", the conflict will never end.
Maybe the solution is one state, with citizens, not religious groups, maybe it is two states (dunno if that is even possible at this point).
Also, extreme conditions in Gaza and West Bank don't help. Imagine if young people there have an option to go to real university, have a nice job, a house. Would they be willing to blow themselves, killing many innocent people. (Not to say poverty is the primary cause of attacks, but that level of desperation certainly doesn't help)
Don't wish or do anything to other people which you wouldn't want for yourself. Imo, that should be a good start. To change the world one must start from himself.
> Well, for one it should (at least try to) protect all civilians not just "its own".
They do. They are known to go to extreme lengths to avoid harming civilians, including calling up before bombing, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombing ahead of actual bombing etc.
And why are they bombing civilian neighborhoods in the first place: because that's were Hamas puts their rocket lauchers. That is a war crime too, and it is worse, because the only reason they do it is to attract attacks towards civilian areas; tactically those rocket attacks are just dumb - they only serve to get media coverage when Israel find they have had enough of it and flatten it.
Israel can end it tomorrow by leaving the middle east entirely, or by taking over the areas, kill the leadership of the various terror groups and grant full citizenship to everybody else. The top leadership is super corrupt and are doing nothing to help the people.
Instead they keep doing this stupid inbetween thing that helps nobody but the weapon manufactures, and those who like to hurt humans.
Granted neither of those options could be done in a day, but peace in two years seems about as good a solution as any, no?
If you read the very same report you linked, you’d see that of the Israelis that Palestinians killed, 69% were civilians, while from the Palestinians which Israel killed, 59% were civilians.
It doesn’t sound like Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
Furthermore: It is also well known for anyone who wants to know that
- Hamas deliberately launch rockets from densely populated areas and from hospitals. This is a war crime as big as anything Israel has done in recent years.
- Israel goes out of their way to avoid harming civilians: often calling affected areas on phone, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombs that go off over rooftops and after that do they bomb the area.
the un has proved countless times, since 1948, that they have no reliability when it comes to honestly presenting the Israel Arab conflict. To prove my point, look at UNRWA, a singular organization, whose sole aim is to maintain the status of the Palestinians as refugees. Show me a comparable organization to UNRWA. Show me any large group of refugees -and there are many- who have had their reputation maintained for 70 years.
Quoting fatality numbers does nothing to disprove the statement. How many armies fire warning shots to let people vacate the area before airstrikes?
Regarding who hold the keys to peace, and who has their finger on the trigger, I think the
government glorifying and paying people who sneak into towns and slaughter sleeping families with knives is a pretty big impediment to peace.
Think about what you are saying. Israel has overwhelming superiority - and yet somehow the Palestinian population is growing?
And this somehow mean "almost without prejudice"?
To me it's exactly the opposite - Israel can do what they want, and yet, they aren't. They are barely harming the Palestinians (compare casualty figures to ANY other conflict).
On the other hand Palestinians (mainly Hamas and other groups in Gaza) are attacking as hard as they possibly can.
So why do you think Israel has the key to peace here? Seems to me it's exactly the opposite.
You make a good point. A lot of people aren't aware of this, but more people die in Mexico every year as a result of cartel violence than have died in the entire history of the Israel Palestine conflict. If Israel were really the big bad oppressive force that people claim it to be, especially with their industrialized military and the asymmetry of the two forces, wouldn't we expect that the death toll would be much higher?
It definitely make it less lethal. Your chances of dying from a well aimed bullet to the legs are an order of magnitude less than a well aimed bullet for the head or chest.
In case it’s unclear: Aiming for the legs would be an option for an unarmed person approaching the Israeli Gaza border, and not yielding to instructions, or warning shots. There’s generally not any other good options if your goal is to keep your border protected, and protect your forces against such events being used as diversions for a real attack, which is why it’s a common tactic.
Also an option: do not shoot at all. If they are unarmed they pose no threat to you, and cannot therefore be a diversion.
It also remains the only moral option, but of course this assumes you consider other people to be humans - given that members of the Stern gang became impotent members of the Israeli government, I am basically convinced that the Isreali government does not, though some individuals do.
Lets put it this way: a 7.62 to the head - an actual, literal "head shot" - is lethal in all but the most exceptional circumstances. Same with the hearth region. A hit in the leg can easily be survived, especially if someone is around you to put a tourniquet on it.
In fact someone in the same boot camp as me got a 7.62 through his thigh after he didn't get the notice and wandered around between the targets as people started shooting. He survived with no lasting injuries. Extremely lucky but still.
Source: I got most of my small arms training on G3s which are 7.62.
There is no ethical dilemma here at all, because these automated killing machines aren't necessary. Borders are defended all over the world by conventional means. Execution by robot is another step towards dystopia, and we should absolutely reject the notion that this is some morally complicated issue.
>Borders are defended all over the world by conventional means.
I think you are wrong. most countries do a terrible job of efficiently- or even effectively- defending borders. I'm not making a political statement, but just look how many illegal immigrants get into US, EU, etc. Even Israel, which is relatively small, has to invest vast resources into maintaining their fences. Please note, i don't want to be dragged into a political discussion, i'm simply explaining why i think your are wrong.
> I'm not making a political statement, but just look how many illegal immigrants get into US, EU, etc.
That's not inefficient/ineffective, the system is just optimized for different things. It ensures a cheap and compliant labor force for things like agriculture.
Plenty of borders around the world are peaceful, and there isn’t much “defending” going on. Those are maintained without much trouble.
If we narrow the discussion to borders that aren’t very peaceful, there aren’t many successful solutions. It looks like “nothing gets through” works, but “only approved traffic gets through” doesn’t work.
Nuclear weapons are not necessary either, but they certainly do give an adversary pause when considering to attack you.
Autonomous weapon systems are no different. They raise the deterrence factor so that you are not likely to be attacked by simply having the capability and your adversary knowing that you have the capability.
> Nuclear weapons are not necessary either, but they certainly do give an adversary pause when considering to attack you.
This is something i've always found weird... Nukes arguably make the world safer by your definition one but particular country gets to decide who is safe and who gets a free conversion to democracy.
Autonomous weapon systems are (theoretically) much more precise and don't leave radioactive destruction in their wake (unless they are nuclear-armed autonomous weapons systems--that's a terrifying thought).
The greater precision and less permanent nature means they are more likely to be used offensively rather than just held in strategic reserve as most nuclear arsenals are.
Conventional autonomous weapons will not be enough to be a replacement for nukes - a peer nation can fight them off with their own autonomous weapons, so there's no MAD at play.
What makes nukes unique, and MAD work, is the simple observation known to every nation: if one country decides to nuke another, there's nothing anyone can do about this - once the decision is made and the button is pressed, the other country turns into glass. But since nukes fly longer than the time it takes to detect and launch a retaliation strike, no one dares to launch first because they'll get glassed too, and there's also nothing anyone can do about it.
Conventional weapons, autonomous or not, can't unleash destruction at necessary scale and certainty.
"Borders all over the world" don't typically have Hezbollah shooting rockets over the border into civilian areas on a regular basis. This is a very unique scenario, and the best response to arbitrary rocket fire, if possible, is an automated and precise response. I highly doubt they're inventing these technologies for fun... there is a defensive need. It is a morally complex issue, because the whole scenario is more intricate than it seems you believe it to be.
Exactly. Roboguns enforcing the border are little different than a minefield except they're much easier to maintain and dismantle, as well as being more reliable and immune to sweeping. It's a no-go zone in either case.
Like with a minefield, morally fine when marked, very immoral if not marked.
Are you really unaware of the brutality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the apartheid established there?
Is it unthinkable that at least some Palestinians would resort to defending themselves after their homes were stolen and while being under constant threat of extermination?
You’re right that it doesn’t compare. Colonisers have always been far more brutal than any response they received.
Your line of comments is really our of line here, not related to the substance of discussion but only pushing a political agenda. Please try to stay close to the topic.
That being said. It is important to emphasis that Israel is not automatically responding to rocket fire from Gaza or Lebanon. There are quite a few humans in the loop.
none of these automated guns are shooting down rockets. they already have anti-missile shields that do that.
nobody fires those rockets for fun, either. the casualty rate among the people doing it (and any civilians who happen to be in the area) is much higher than that of their targets.
That's a good point. It seems like unless there's not only a 100% counter-attack success rate but also a 100% missile detonation prevention rate, many/most of the attackers will believe that they'll be entering paradise soon anyway, so even a chance of killing civilians means they likely won't be deterred.
It might deter some percentage, but considering how many people gladly accept certain death, an increased chance of death isn't a big hurdle.
This unnecessarily others the people on that side of the conflict. They are desperate because their credible and civilized protests of apparent apartheid, let alone global recognition of their claim to sovereignty, are ignored.
You may have read some kind of normative judgment into my post which absolutely wasn't present. I wasn't trying to take any kind of side regarding any aspect of the Israel-Palestine situation whatsoever.
I'm just thinking in terms of technology and possible outcomes, from a purely pragmatic point of view. You might have just started reading my post by trying to guess which side I was more likely to be on, and then confirmation bias may have just caused you to interpret the way I said things to validate that guess. (I could easily see someone also coming to the opposite conclusion from that post, for example. But you and they would both be wrong.)
I don't think the language I used was "othering". I just think sometimes some things are talked about from an abstract, realpolitik-esque, mechanistic perspective, and sometimes things are talked about from a human and moral perspective. It's only a problem if you're trying to do the latter and you end up sounding like the former.
However, you do make a valid point. I only brought up the afterlife component, but due to what you say, they may feel cornered, like they have less to lose and are making a last stand of sorts, which might further bolster determination and willingness to risk death. So that's another factor.
Unless you yourself believe, and expect that it is customary for most to believe, that people will undertake drastic, even suicidal, action in hopes of achieving a preferred afterlife, this is little more than a long-winded rationalization of your weaponization of an extremely offensive stereotype. And I think you know that; hence, the wall of text.
Your comments continue to confuse me. I wrote that text because I'm befuddled by these weird assumptions you're reading into my post and I wanted to explain where I was coming from.
It's besides the point of the discussion, but I overwhelmingly support the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestine conflict and agree with your comments on the matter. Of course I sympathize with people struggling in desperation. I don't think it's offensive, or a stereotype, or untrue, to say that many of them are more okay with dying because they believe death isn't permanent and that the afterlife will be a positive experience. I think that's just a fact which carries no value judgment.
Of course, I understand that even if they thought death were permanent, they still may brazenly risk death to fight for their cause, but my point was that the belief that it isn't permanent even further increases that determination to face death.
This is just a thread about AI, not about politics, which is why I made it about AI.
It's not more morally reprehensible than landmines. Borders all over the world use landmines, one of the most common weapons for area denial. Remote controlled or autonomous machine guns have the advantage that you can retire them more easily. With landmines, if you misplaced the map, you have a problem. Even if you still have the map you have a problem: what if the map is only 99% accurate?
164 states have already signed an anti-personnel mine treaty, and more countries will join in the coming years. 48 million land mines have already been destroyed because of this Ottawa treaty, and this is a moral good.
There is a strong movement for banning anti-personnel mines precisely because they are horrific weapons that kill and maim indiscriminately.
If discrimination in terms of time is what concerns you, then I guess you'll welcome this new development of autonomous machine guns used for area denial, right? They address exactly the problem, after all.
You're right it's not an ethical dilemma at all, but your reasons are completely off. All killing of humans by other humans is unethical, regardless of technology. Saying there is a dilemma implies that somehow a human would make killing another human ok. I find the whole tone of this article to be ridiculous...I would love to find an actual discussion in which an ethicist rationalizes war, and if you can't find that then the implication that machines somehow make the situation less ethical is ridiculous.
> All killing of humans by other humans is unethical
It's going to be difficult for you to find many people who agree with this assertion.
Most people awknowledge the necessity of self defense, and many others who agree with the death or penalty agree with the idea of death as punishment for certain classes of crimes.
Now there's an argument to be made about a judicial process being followed or the issue with unintended consequences/blowback but it's a hard sell to your average person that a brutal dictator shouldn't be killed.
Borders are a fake idea in an age when our “elite” are rich enough to be global and stateless. Look at people straight-up buying NZ citizenship, for example. The ultimate divide-and-conquer for humanity as long as the “other side” can be made to sound scary enough.
South Korea uses unmanned sentry guns to defend the DMZ. This gives them some degree of protection from another Northern invasion, even without US assistance.
If I were to characterize any part of Korea as a “dystopia”, it wouldn’t be the part that defends itself with robot machine guns. Indeed, the robot machine guns were invented to protect South Korea from falling under the dystopia that has overrun the North.
And more importantly, would you rather put the north in charge of the south, or the south in charge of the north? Which scenario do you think would turn out better for the people who live there?
Well the fun thing about putting the north in charge is that everyone will learn about how Kim Il didn’t need to ever use the restroom and had 11 hole-in-ones the 1St time he golfed :p
Maybe you should tell the South Korean military that. You go do that, and if they listen to your opinion and change their policy based on your insights, I’ll be happy to concede the point. Until then, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the South Koreans know what they’re doing.
So, I realize that lots of apocalyptic projections get made about AI that have a habit of not coming true, but this seems like an awful idea. Also, an awfully hard one to resist. If your opponent has fast-as-a-computer-can-pull-the-trigger firepower, it's going to be pretty hard to resist the urge to get your own.
Once you have two sides with automated offensive capability, we are one bug away from the kind of mistakes that, during the Cold War, were intercepted by humans in the loop. I'm not sure how this can NOT end badly.
I have a feeling that humans will remain overwhelmingly responsible for most of the wartime mistakes.
I think this will further reduce conflict between advanced nations (robots killing robots just becomes a stalemate) and will intensely escalate any asymmetric conflicts where one advanced nation can crush whoever without having to pay the price of deploying humans (think CIA drone strikes).
"wartime mistakes" is a nice euphemism. And I'm sure that people will continue be held to account. For instance when somebody whoopsies and dronestrikes a wedding party in Jemen.
Hah. Good point. But I meant like self driving: we suuuuuuuck. Let's not fool ourselves acting like it's critical that there's a human touch to things.
Nor should we fool ourselves that it's important for a machine to take over. We don't "suuuck" at driving -- or at killing other people, for that matter: as a species, on average, we're fairly competent at both tasks. The fact that a machine might have a lower failure rate isn't a singular reason to embrace the tech.
I agree with that. I was also referring to how much we suck at not killing the wrong people. I imagine systemic racism would still exist, but at least the robots are making decisions consistently.
> I imagine systemic racism would still exist, but at least the robots are making decisions consistently.
We program our robots with our prejudices[1]. If you don't control the machines, you can't change their programming. It's entirely possible that such prejudices are cemented through machines that cannot be influenced or changed except through actions of their owners.
What happens when the owners of these machines are indifferent towards, or outright supportive of, prejudice? History is rife with owners of companies, industries and governments exploiting and furthering prejudice for their own benefit.
Exactly. If your fire-control system is trained on a dataset that (through carelessness or malice) has some bias, you could end up with a racist machine gun turret.
the problem with this is, our prejudices can change, sometimes very quickly. A person who loves dogs, for example, might hate them after being mauled by one. Simply put, i don't think we can simply write down our emotional processes easily enough to make advanced ai relevant.
I'd say more countries will choose a nuclear route over being droned to death at near zero cost to attacker.
Atomic weapons are forties technology, and even nations as locked down, and downtrodden like North Korea, or Israel (as it was in sixties) can not only make one, but seemingly genuinely capable of keeping it hidden against modern spy, and nuclear detection tech.
Nuclear weapons still aren't easy to make by any means. It's not so much the nuclear physics that's the challenge as it is all of the engineering best-practices. That, and the difficulty of obtaining raw materials.
And nuclear weapons aren't a binary either. North Korea has demonstrated the actual bomb, but their delivery systems are still far from reliable. Their rockets might technically have the range to threaten the US, but what are the chances they could actually hit their target? And how many launch vehicles do they realistically have? Not likely enough to seriously threated any other nuclear powers. And this after making decades of enormous political and economic sacrifices to pursue nuclear weapons. I don't think most countries will feel tempted to follow their lead.
You don't need 100% reliance on ICBMs if your only aim just to hit enemy's mainland for the sake of it. Cheaper means are on the table.
Much more relevant theatre range weapons are things even NK can manufacture. I was very surprised to learn that North Korea not only designed a working cruise missile with their economy, but had a working terrain hugging flight on it.
On average, or by percentile? Because I think one is more likely to be revealing than the other.
A 1Mt device might only have a 50% chance of killing 1+ people if detonated at the proper altitude at a random location within the US, (47% of the US is uninhabited) but average 1000 deaths (~6mi lethal radius, US overall population density of 90p/sqmi).
In intent no, in unintended risk yes. And not in a "collateral damage" kind of way, more in a "it's hard to use a bomb in a way the damage zone becomes 100x bigger than intended".
> a centralized AI will be needed to coordinate all of the autonomous weapon systems
Why?
At a tactical level, an AI to coordinate a battlefield makes sense. (Speed of light means local computing has an advantage, particularly with directed energy weapons.) And an AI to advise on strategy, and coördinate those battlefield AIs, makes sense.
But while battles are mechanical, war is political. At the point that the human becomes replaceable we’d have an AI substitute for government, which is a long way away.
For grand strategic concerns, we have nukes, and those still fly slowly and detectably enough that an AI commanding counterstrike is unnecessary. (Unless submarine platforms become detectable and thus destroyable in a first strike.)
Why? Each individual system is more than capable of simply fulfilling tactics on their own. We're not short computing power! Central coordination is a risk to be avouded -- each individual drone can simply be Skynet all in their own.
A culture has computer simulated war and “casualties” must report to euthanasia chambers.
This was the end result agreed to to stop actual bombings.
Of course, the officers disrupt it in the end. But it’d be interesting if they returned and nothing was left but craters.
More on topic, iron dome is an automated missile interception system and works well to protect Israelis from missile attacks. Just because a system is automated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea, but obviously there’s high risk.
You could argue that the Iron Dome has allowed the Israelis to perpetuate the conflict. If Israel citizens were faced with actually dying, they might push for a peaceful resolution faster.
>proportionate response, narrow targeting, and trying not to kill civilians are good things.
How is it better to only respond with proportionate responses? If you were known as generally a good country, but could go mad at the drop of a hat, other countries would take even more steps to avoid harming you, wouldn't they?
At the same time, if you were known of flattening neighborhods or even entire cities, your enemies wouldn't be able to hide among civilians.
In either case you trade of more deaths now, for fewer dead in the future.
Unfortunately, 70+ years ago, one side was prevented from winning their war of independence. Then 50ish years ago, when they were attacked, same thing. Then 40ish years ago.
As horrible as it sounds, either the losing side needs to accept reality and concede (disbanding UNRWA would be a giant step in the right direction to force that issue), or the war should resume, and the gloves and restraints need to come off, until one or the other side sues for peace.
This is the only way to end this conflict. Otherwise it is going to simmer forever. Without the cost for continuing the conflict being made very high, it will continue. The cost for Israel to protect its citizens is very high. The cost for launching attacks against Israelis needs to be disproportionately high for a change in political approach to be considered.
I've been here a long time. This may actually win the award for most ridiculous comment ever written on HN. To argue that a main should willingly sacrifice their people for... what exactly? Why do you think these systems were built? To keep their people from "actually dying." Another route could be to indiscriminately return 10x fire for every indiscriminately fired inbound rocket. Would that be an appropriate response? I mean, it could "push for a peaceful resolution faster."
It wasn't an argument that one side should allow people to die, it was an argument that high mutual cost deters conflict and encourages diplomatic engagement. Which is true, see: nukes.
Deterrence presumes rational actors. One side in this conflict is rational. The other side, decidedly irrational, acting not in their best interests, harming themselves and many others specifically to attack the rational actor.
Aside from that, the real issue is that the irrational side has not yet conceded that they lost their war, 70+ years ago, against the rational actor, who had established a state. They instigated that war, as they did not wish the rational actor to have that state. They are aided in their irrationality by various NGOs, and have managed to perpetuate and sustain their presumed victimhood, by attacking, with literal impunity, the rational actor.
Now, here, you are suggesting that maybe, the rational actor should be restricted in their response to the irrational actor as it may bring the rational actor to the negotiating table. Which of course, completely neglects all the times the rational actor sat at the negotiating table with the irrational actor, hammered things most of the way out, and watched the irrational actor breach every single agreement.
So ...
What we have here has nothing to do with rational actor deciding enough is enough, and developing tech to reasonably neutralize the threat the irrational actor poses. Arguing against this de minimus effort, as it might bring the rational actor back to the table (in your mind) if they had to rely on sticks and stones ... is pretty much the definition of ludicrous.
The rational actor has tried, for 70+ years, to get the irrational actor to work with it. And has been met with bloodshed, the irrational actor targeting civilians, which, is a real war crime, as compared to the BS alleged by the irrational actor, in their attempt to get the world to ostracize the rational actor.
Exactly how, would this time be different? What would the irrational actor offer to jump start discussions? Because it is obvious from the last 70+ years that the underlying thesis of "land for peace" has not worked.
A different approach was, and is needed. As much as I hate giving Trump credit, what he did was to change the parameters, which allowed other nations to get off the ledge with the irrational actor. This is, in turn, putting pressure on the irrational actor to begin acting rationally. Those actions need to continue.
This all said, implying you wish to disarm a people who have armed themselves specifically to prevent mass slaughter at the hands of a losing side irrational non-nation state actor ... yeah ... not really a sound argument in any context.
I wasn't suggesting anything other than what I said. When the cost of conflict is high, people are less likely to want it. I personally don't have any strong opinions on the conflict in Palestine, especially not anything prescriptive.
The one response I'll give your perspective is: I think a better way of framing it is organized vs fragmented as opposed to rational vs irrational. Israel has a stable, empowered, central authority, while Palestine does not. To call the latter simply 'irrational' ignores the fact that it isn't a single entity, and may be composed of many rational actors with differing incentives. Even a single person can act rationally at all points in time and still appear irrational over some window. The more chaotic an environment, the less rational it's constituents will appear over a given window of time or geography.
I understand your point of view but I am not sure current state is sustainable and that Israel is rational actor long term.
Israel depends on several things to be true and any one or two of them being false probably means end of state
1. Israel has much stronger economy than neighboring states. Hi tech army is expensive
2. Strong internal cohesion with no widespread protests/division or civil war.
3. Modern weapons systems are exclusively available to Israel
4. Strong US support with both money and political cover
5. Arabs not becoming majority in Israel thru demographics
6. Arab states continue to be in shitty state
Specifically
3 may not be true for long with China investing in military capabilities
4 is not assured with woke anti-colonialism ideology and AOC/Tlaib/Ilhan increasing influence on Dem party.
All Palestinians need to do is not to give up. Israel need to win every single time as there is no recovery from loss.
There is argument that strategically Israel is at the strongest moment and it can get most concessions from Palestinians now. In future it may end up in much worse bargaining position.
It always amazes me how some people are unable to accept the fact that there are extremists ideologies in this world. The fact that you think that it’s possible to solve a conflict with diplomatic talks, no matter if the ideology in front of you is capable of sacrificing its own children in suicide bombings to kill other civilians ( which not even the nazis or the japanese kamikaze did), in a pure act of hate, should let you think twice about the best tactic.
Sometimes, it is really impossible to talk some sense to some people. It’s just very hard to accept for us, but it just is, and history has proved that sometimes force is , unfortunately, the wisest choice.
I'm sure that if the Palestinians were granted either citizenship in a Palestinian state or equal citizenship in Israel, there would be many fewer ideologues in the region.
Let's be clear Israel itself was born from "extreme views" implemented by violence. There are no examples of this kind of civil conflict that have been solved by simply overwhelming the other side. Dialogue needs to happen, and reining in extremists (settlers, Hamas) on both sides would be a good start.
If you have accepted this narrative then surely you can understand that there are also extremist ideologues who believe the other side cannot be reasoned with and war is the only solution. The pendulum swings both ways but eventually rests in the middle. Whether that middle ground is peace or a detente history will tell.
It's easy to dismantle this argument by realising that you're making a fake comparison. Nobody (not even ISIS) is going to be stupid enough to give access to nukes to the kinds of people that they value little enough to send on suicide bomb attacks. This was also true for the Axis forces. Nobody was entrusting low level SS and Kamikaze grunts with nuclear codes and the same would be true for even a "rogue" state like North Korea or Iran.
You also clearly don't understand what path would lead someone to resort to suicide bombing if you think you can reduce it to "a pure act of hate". These are desperate people who have been brainwashed to the point that they think they would bring more net worth to the world by blowing themselves and their surroundings up than living on. What would help "talk sense" to people is to stop engaging in illegal invasive wars that (intentionally or unintentionally) destabilise their region.
Nope... being poor never justified suiciding your own children. For that you need an ideology that’s strong enough to brainwash the most basic natural instincts of the parent.
This came up way back in the 1980s with the "Star Wars" project. What is the purpose of an anti-ballistic missile defense system? Is it intended to protect our citizens from enemy aggression, or to protect our citizens from the results of our aggression?
Why would the Israeli government want to do anything to resolve the Palestinian situation when they gain so much from allowing it to continue at a low level?
> This may actually win the award for most ridiculous comment ever written on HN.
In that case you broke the site guidelines by replying, and so perpetuating the flamewar, leading to hellish places like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460291. Please note:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
That's our version of "Please don't feed the trolls". The GP comment was egregious and deservedly flagged. Discussion can and should stop there. It's the reasonable and/or semi-reasonable replies to egregious comments that actually turn these threads into conflagrations.
What you just wrote is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.
At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Flamebait like this is totally unacceptable on HN, regardless of how you feel about the underlying topic. We ban accounts that damage the site this way. No more of this please.
Reminded me directly of that episode. First drones kill people. Then drones kill drones. Then they destroy things. Then it goes completely virtual to save real-world costs.
When I watch the Star Wars movies, I mostly think of them as pure fantasy. Except for the killer drone in "Attack of the Clones" -- that was the one time I thought "That's definitely going to happen. They're going to make that."
> Once you have two sides with automated offensive capability, we are one bug away from the kind of mistakes that, during the Cold War, were intercepted by humans in the loop
There is a massive difference between guns on automated fire control and an AI aiming missiles.
One could argue that, by making the fire control guaranteed, the border might stop being challenged and deaths thus go down. (Nobody to taunt, either.)
Not really. Mine fields are not certain death. They don’t always have the opportunity to announce themselves. Guns on automated fire control have the option of announcing themselves prior to engaging. They can also be turned off, something not easy to do with mines.
It’s painful but necessary to note that Hamas have a track record of weaponising children [1]. A child approaching the border is thus not guaranteed safe, and could reasonably be fired upon by a human or a gun on automated fire control. (Not arguing for killing kids. Just that “kids could get killed” isn’t an effective argument against this weapons platform.)
War is terrible. I don’t think automatic guns make it significantly more terrible. (Landmines do.)
>Landmines work by the same principle. Many killed by landmines are children.
That makes no sense to me. Children being killed by landmines is an example of a lack of fire control. If the land mine had fire control it could detect enemy soldiers then children wouldn't have to die.
This would seem to be a strict improvement over antipersonnel landmines along every dimension, while providing the same necessary function of area denial.
In particular, you don't set up a few thousand roboguns and then leave them there when the conflict is over, which is responsible for most of the civilian deaths you're referring to, including those of children.
The incentive to challenge the border is not going away, it's simply more suicidal and ineffective to do it at the border. Perfect automated defense will encourage "challenges" away from the unassailable border, against easier targets such as police stations, shopping centers, and schools...
> One could argue that, by making the fire control guaranteed, the border might stop being challenged and deaths thus go down. (Nobody to taunt, either.)
Except it's not a border, it's more like a massive concentration camp. Plus, the kill zone is hundreds of meters inwards.
The next evolution of such killing tech will be AI capable but remotely controlled systems.
Its time governments around the world invest in quality gamers to help them fight their battles.
I can't help but think, in a war between two nations fighting exclusively with such tech (not too far fetched for my generation or my kids generation), war itself becomes comical and essentially a measure of economic strength. How quickly can you build these robots and how quickly can you deploy them.
Imagine a general shouting orders over a bunch of acne-faced teenagers trying to win a war for his country.
I don't understand the disconnect on this topic with technically proficient and interested people. We can talk all day about how autonomous driving is safer than manual driving, but as soon as weapons are mentioned we rely on this idea that not having a human in the decision making process makes error more likely. How can both be true?
With a self-driving car, the desired outcome is to save lives. With an autonomous weapon, the desired outcome is to kill. Having a human inefficiency in the loop means you can have mercy and refrain from killing.
I don't think the problem is with AIs acurrately identifying friends and enemies. You can't solve that 100% anyway, but if it can aid humans and prevent mistakes, all the better. The problem is when you start to build absolutely relentless border drones that can one-shot the enemy, without any possibility for mercy or negotiation.
I don't think there's a single militarized border on earth where the sentry holding the gun has any say on whether he must shoot someone who violates the perimeter. Mercy and negotiation on these issues happen with diplomacy, not along the fenceline.
With weapons, the desired outcome is not to kill, not in most circumstances anyway. In circumstances where it is, it is almost always the desire of an individual wielding a weapon. Normally, the desired outcome is deterrence or defense, and when used proactively, to lessen the enemy's ability to continue to wage the conflict. With deterrence, the threat of death is the deterrent, with defense, killing is the machanism by which the threat is neutralized, and with proactive aggression the goal may or may not include killing, and is more likely to include killing if the enemy's ability to wage conflict is dependent on manpower. In all three scenarios, the desired outcome of developing autonomous military capability is to save lives.
I doubt that is true. In Iraq and Afghanistan there was wide variation in the number of civilians killed by different units. Some of that may be context-effects, but I doubt all of it.
Also, having people in the loop reminds at least someone that this is 'real' and that we need to carry on thinking about it. If you can obliterate enemies' bodies and the only duty on people is to restock the ammo I think that reduces the moral burden of conflict in an unacceptable way.
What I mean is, if your goal is to keep people out of a certain area, period, the drone will say "can do", and it will be able to do it with frightening precision and no doubts. Humans have natural stopping points.
One maybe stupid example is when there were lots of Syrian refugees on the way through Europe in 2015. We learned the hard way that, if people are pushing against your borders, the only way to keep them out is to eventually use force. We were not willing to do so, so we had to accept that and grant people asylum (which I think was the right decision).
Imagine (a bit scifi but for the sake of argument) "border patrol 2000", which will give a warning, then give a more stern warning, then raise a wall, then try rubber bullets, then try to keep you from climbing the wall with a grappling arm, and finally using live rounds. If you are really determined it will eventually have to shoot. Human solderies did shoot in the past but they did also sometimes not shoot, and it always had a political aftermath. But with automatic systems, it is too easy to psychologically detach, and to say it's e.g. the refugees own fault.
I would have thought that the main reason people ‘shoot to kill’ is in self protection, if more autonomy is introduced then surely lethal force would be required in less situations.
Most of the persons crossing the border between Gaza and Israel do so for nefarious purposes, ie attacking civilians in nearby Israeli villages and cities. So yeah, it's self protection.
It wasn't always like this, Gaza had an airport, free travel to Israel and Egypt, etc. But the majority in Gaza has voted for Hamas, an extremist party which calls for the annihilation of Israel, so for now all Israel can do is watch the border closely and thwart attacks.
It is also telling that Egypt allows no traffic over the border while Israel typically allow tens of semi trailers a day of food an humanitarian aid as long as they can ensure weapons aren't smuggled in.
> The Palestinians agreed that all imports of goods are diverted to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, because Israel threatened to exclude Gaza from the customs union out of concern about the implementation of the Paris Protocol.
> Israel tightly limits the flow of concrete, cement, iron bars and other materials into Gaza, as “dual use” items that could have a military purpose if they were seized by Hamas to rebuild tunnels used to launch attacks.
> That means few homes have been rebuilt despite international pledges of billions for reconstruction. Rather than wait to rebuild permanent homes, some relief agencies have decided to build temporary structures with materials they can get.
> The adverse effect of dual-use restrictions is mostly felt in manufacturing, ICT and agriculture. The agriculture sector contributes significantly to Palestinian food security; however, the dual use restrictions have lowered the concentration of active chemicals in fertilizers making them less effective and lowering land productivity to half of that in Jordan and only 43 percent of the yield in Israel.
> For example, the restriction on ‘communications equipment, communications supporting equipment, equipment containing communication functions’, limits access to modern manufacturing production lines, spare parts, medical equipment and home appliances. It has also stood in the way of developing the Palestinian ICT sector and created a large technological gap with neighboring countries.
Everything's dual-use, then, including basic necessities.
Food - could be used to feed combatants!
Medicine - could be used to treat combatants!
Consider the possibility that "you're not allowed to build houses for your families because we won't let the materials in" potentially inflames more terrorism than it stops.
edit: Regarding your edit, "Edit: Basic necessities to sustain life - food, water, medicines are allowed."
Shelter is considered one of the basic necessities.
> If you had a bad neighbor, you would do the same.
If I had a bad neighbor, and I walled them in and forbade them from buying concrete and fertilizer, the police would likely intervene in their favor.
Next warfares will be much deadlier for civilians... These automated systems can scale in a devastating way, imagine million of people deciding between dying of hunger at home or getting shot automatically in the streets.
Imagine if the military forces of Myanmar had this kind of robots and decided to deploy them during civil protests...
modern warfare is already extremely deadly to civilians. you don't need a robot to kill innocent people when soldiers of all stripes are apparently perfectly willing.
That's way too simplistic. If one of these drones could have killed Hitler and saved millions of innocent people, would you still say it's not ethical?
The reason to dislike these machines is because of the practical problem of making sure they only target bad-guys. That said... their continued development and deployment is essentially inevitable anyway.
Come on, that's not a charitable interpretation of my argument. It's meant to highlight the idea that there are targets _today_ that would make the world a better place if we could kill them. And it doesn't matter what tool we use to do so, it's still an ethical action.
I don't like the idea of these devices very much, I see the problem with controlling them. But there's no way to stop them from being created. The required technologies are too pervasive and reproducible.
> It's meant to highlight the idea that there are targets _today_ that would make the world a better place if we could kill them.
We think it would. We thought that about knocking off Saddam Hussein, but the resulting power vacuum killed a lot more than he ever did and gave rise to ISIS.
It turns out predicting "if we kill this guy, it's good" can be far more difficult than you're making it out to be. Hell, we don't even know if killing Hitler would've been good; it might've given rise to someone far more competent.
That argument has absolutely nothing to do with this article. Not saying I disagree, but it's true or false regardless if we kill with a robot or not. It's irrelevant to the discussion.
Killing Saddam didn't require locking all the Baathists in prison together with other criminals and letting them foment revolution. Killing Saddam didn't require trying to hand control back over to the Iraqis way too early, over and over again.
We killed Hitler and it's been a net good because we're still in Germany making sure 80 years later. If we'd planned for something similar in Iraq we might not have fucked it up so badly.
Weird, I didn't make a value judgment, I had only pointed out the biting irony of the situation at hand. Any assumption you've made from my post is just that: an assumption.
the irony kinda depends on the value judgment though, at least under my reading. if the israelis invented a delicious new candy, would it be ironic that nazis would have enjoyed it? or slightly less ridiculous: the nazis would certainly have loved to have a rifle like the galil. is that ironic?
The irony is that the Nazis are famous as sadistic torturers and deniers of human liberty and these days it is Israel which is famous in the world as one of these along with some other shameful nations (i.e. North Korea)
“ Take the Israeli Border Control Sentry-Tech turret currently deployed along Gaza’s border. They were designed to prevent Palestinians from leaving the Gaza strip and entering Israeli territory.
Automated ‘Robo-Snipers’ set up along the Gaza border, designed to create “automated kill-zones” at least 1.5 km deep. But they aren’t merely robotic guns. The turrets feature heavy duty 7.62 calibre machine guns tied into a network spanning the entire border. If any turret detects human movement, the entire chain of guns can train their sights and concentrate firepower on the interloper. Some turrets are also able to fire explosive rockets.”
Literally created to destroy a population they already control at will. If this were China people would be up in arms, but because it’s Israel I have to make a private account to post comfortably.
It's really important that actual humans are sent to war and die because it's the o ly think that makes us hesitate to go to war. Otherwise your in Ray Bradbury's distopia where wars are just rich countries slaughtering people in poor ones with no sense of hesitation. That's what drones represent: not skynet but man's inhumanity to man. Imagine wars being like action movies, watch the assassination live, tonight at 9!
Yeah, that's fair. I would hope the aim is always reducing bloodshed (by intervention in genocides and not in stable countries). I'm not sure how to actually achieve that...
The philosopher Arne Næss once argued that cannibalism practiced by eating the fallen would be a moral good because it would serve as a strong incentive to limit war.
The idea is the same - war should not be sanitized, because it removes pressure to constrain them.
It's important that the cost of war is visceral to both sides.
Someone once suggested that the nuclear launch codes should be implanted in a living human volunteer. If the president wanted to launch the missiles, he would have to killed the person in front of him before he could kill millions 10,000km away...
I guess so did machine guns and all ways to kill more people for cheaper and with more effectiveness (rockets, etc..). then again, it doesn't matter; they're here to stay, cat's out of the bag.
> More critically, it’s nearly impossible to externally distinguish between a kill made with human oversight or machine autonomy, blurring the lines of accountability on the battlefield.
This seems like the real threat to me. The ethics of outright autonomous weapons have a straightforward solution, at least in theory: giving the order to deploy them is precisely morally equivalent to pulling the trigger yourself. A flying bullet is a simpler system than an autonomous network of machine guns, but you still set it in motion and are responsible for its path. No, the tricky part is when you can't tell who set it in motion.
Kind of amazed at all the suprised pikachu faces here when videogames have been giving us experience dealing with autonomously-operated turrets for decades
Also the joystick control is kind of LOL. Give her a mouse and keyboard!
a) Those weapons are not autonomous, they are remote controlled. Just fancy more accurate guided missiles. They are alternative for blind bombing. Like any weapon, it depends what you do with them and what your enemy is doing.
b) This type of weapons exists in many military industries and is bought by many countries (any country that can afford them). Making this specifically "ethical" in connection to Israel is appallingly biased.
“Euphemistically described as a ‘fire-and-forget’ weapon, the Israeli Aerospace Industries’ Harop autonomously attacks any target meeting previously identified criteria, but includes a ‘man-in-the-loop’ feature that allows a human to technically prevent an attack from taking place.”
Are you saying it is not autonomous just because there is a person in loop? Seems pretty clear that it would be easy to remove that person, making it fully autonomous, unlike a remote controlled device.
It's less autonomous than anti-radar missiles, heat-seeking missiles, etc., ... Not to mention "dumb" munition like mortar shells.
I any case, even if there was some 'autonomous' weapon (which is not the case here), what is the point of talking about autonomicity of weapons as though they are not being deployed and launched by humans.
“ Demand for autonomous ‘suicide drones’ is at an all-time high after the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict of 2020, which established a benchmark for the effective use of kamikaze drones against conventional military forces.”
I have read many statements similar to this in recent months, but I haven’t come across a good analysis of how offensive drones were used/defended against (if they were) in that conflict. Anyone have a good resource?
You'll also find countless combat footage from the azeri drones destroying Armenian positions. Some are even on YouTube, most on the azeri defense ministry.
Israel been supplying the azeris with drones for a while, and were even accused of "test firing" it on real Armenian troops themselves to impress the azeris into buying them.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadFor those that haven't seen it, it's on youtube.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
And they've been on battlefields for much longer.
My point: you're not going to find many drones like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov in the foreseeable future.
It's also failing to actually realize military objectives. The problem isn't delivering bullets or explosives to the target, it's finding the target in the first place.
Drone surveillance is a much bigger threat than killer drones. You are more likely to be thrown into prison because of drone technology than being killed.
"War is symmetric" is a fallacy. You often can't shoot back at who is shooting at you, but you can shoot at others.
Anyone who eschews development of such military system risks becoming a toy of those who went all in.
The Armenians just lost a lot of territory in Nagorno Karabakh they considered their own - to an enemy who had suicide drones. Their country wasn't exactly big even before that loss.
Fifty other nations in potentially similar position looked at that war and its outcome. I doubt that their decisions were "let us stay moral and possibly be next on the chopping block".
IMHO while it's true their enemy had 'suicide drones' (which are actually loitering munitions, but 'suicide' makes it sound so much more evil) that wasn't a deciding factor - they also had Turkish drones that didn't require self detonation to work.
Azerbaijan put a lot of videos on youtube showing them bombing and pursuing groups of Armenian soldiers with those drones, not the suicide drones. The suicide drones were anti material weapons against mobile air defense and other harder targets.
The azeris even used old (trash) AN-2's turned into drones to get a response from Armenian air defense systems so that loitering munitions like the herop could identity air defense systems with minimal danger.
We are already in this race. Everyone is, even if they won't acknowledge it. Without anti air/anti drone technology no ground force is safe. This isn't new or unique to drones - it's the truth of every war where air dominance occurs.
In the Six Day War Israel destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground in its opening strike, and when Egypt tried to retreat from the Sinai they used their air force to bomb the retreating units with impunity. The remnants of Egypt's air force couldn't fight against an intact air force so they flew support sorties but were overall ineffective. No drones required. It's just gotten cheaper to do.
If the Meanie Republic uses Agony Clouds against the citizens of Goodistan, the rest of the world notices. Maybe the Meanie Republic completely wins and even annexes Goodistan, but the bystander countries are going to take Meanie atrocities into account when deciding how to interact with that state.
Relatedly, a year ago "Why don't we use chemical weapons anymore" was trending on HN (it's a good read): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22661465
So the moral outrage is likely to be absent, at least compared to things like flattening of Rotterdam by Luftwaffe or Rape of Nanking.
The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if your enemy (or your friends, or civilians, or large dogs, or cattle) enter the minefield, they're going to die or at least be mutilated.
Obviously, some of that is disadvantage. The biggest disadvantage is that they're cheap, and buried in the ground, so it's tempting to leave them there, especially if you happen to lose the conflict. So they continue to kill people long after there are no enemies left.
Automated gunbots have the same advantage as landmines. They share a shade of the minor disadvantage, namely they can't reliably tell enemies from friendlies or civilians. But neither can a grunt in a machine gun emplacement.
They are expensive, and above the ground, so there's no world in which civilian children, years after the conflict, are shot to death while playing in a field.
So if these are the "next landmine" I say: good. We would all love to live in the world in which there is no war, but, we don't. Until we do, we will need the weapons of war.
It's still immoral.
In a vacuum, with perfectly spherical frictionless humans, sure.
In the world we live in, a technology which replaces landmines, and kills fewer noncombatants, is an improvement which results in less civilian death. That's moral in my playbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
A scenario where Palestinians are permanently blinded for approaching the prison fences in Gaza or elsewhere is honestly horrifying.
> It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.
A better comparison would be the Japanese approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
It is said that Al Saladin, upon learning that Richard Lionheart’s horse had died in battle had the best horse in his own stalls sent to his opponent as a gift.
It would appear that Saladin held King Richard in high esteem (he was brutal to those he did not)
Compare that behavior with our drones and F-16 raining death from the safety of miles of distance, and you see how pusillanimous we’ve become. Im sure NPR will wax poetically about drone operator’s PTSD, but it’s not PTSD what they suffer from for there was no trauma. It’s shame, guilt and disgust.
In the Christian West we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war. We sought to emulate him, added his behavior to our codes of chivalry. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that future generations will spit on the memory of our generals loosing wars from the safety of telework.
Given PTSD manifests in people who have never killed and is not restricted to soldiers (e.g. victims of sexual assault and traffic accidents [1]), this claim is unsubstantiated.
> we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war
You’re transporting values from a zero-growth world, where war was practically the only route to advancement, to a positive-growth one. War was honourable when it was necessary. It is no longer necessary. The era of celebrating our enemies has long passed. (That is why everything is now framed in terms of defense.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-traumatic_stress_disord...
PTSD is the last of a long list of euphemisms used to describe shell shock. To make war more palpable. Eventually the shrinks added all the bad life experiences as causes of PTSD. To dilute the unique horror of war.[1]
Therefore, today a guy who sees his best friend blow up next to him from landmine, or a solder who witnesses one of our “friend and ally” rape a boy [2] has the same diagnosis as someone who got into a car accident.
Even the fact that PTSD is not a word but an acronym oozes with our degeneracy and America’s military bureaucracy in particular.
“You’re transporting values from a zero-growth world, where war was practically the only route to advancement, to a positive-growth one.”
Or maybe our forefathers weren’t as obsessed with careerism and advancement as we are today? Never mind that those who waged war were born into the highest class so there was little to advance (King Richard Lionheart was King!)
Anyway, we get to pass on higher values because we’re rich? So values are ephemeral not universal? If values are not universal I’ll take the gallantry of the crusaders who mourned their valiant enemies over the moral emptiness of our generals. (And what do these generals have to show for their moral laxity? A long string of defeat. These generals are, as Trump pointed out, losers)
Nor does it appear to be true that we became dishonorable when we became a growth society. There are a great many examples of men acting with honor in the world wars, and we certainly were a growth obsessed industrialized society then! [3]
And the whole argument that war was necessary then, it isn’t now is just not true.
War was as necessary then as it is today. Which is to say not much. Read the old philosophers, Church fathers, the Bhagavad Gita etc, the Chinese sages, and the futility of war is expressed unambiguously. How many ancient texts throughout all Eurasian cultures caution the ruler against war?
No, it is us that are dishonorable, not the age we live in. The Persians returned Leonidas’ body for burial [4]. Obama dumped Bin Laden’s body overboard and lied that he gave him a Muslim burial.
By not treating our brothers in arms with dignity and honor we have become degenerates.
[1] War is uniquely horrible because, when conducted dishonorably it embraces all other horrors.
[2] Afghanistan
[3] my favorite story is of a German pilot in WW2 who didn’t finish off a plane that he had crippled. Instead he escorted it back to the channel. The two pilots eventually met after the war and the German said that that action had saved his humanity.
[4] Xerxes was known for his anger and he uncharacteristically (for the Persians) kept the body to deny it burial. 40 years later, the Persians restored their honor and returned it.
> With such overlapping fields of fire, even heavily armored vehicles would be quickly eliminated. The effect on a human body would be overwhelming, disproportionately violent, and would leave little in the way of human remains.
You can tell this is not written by a person with any military knowledge or with an agenda against weapons.
Non peaceful borders have been manned with such weapons operated by humans for more than a century (in the case of machine guns). And generally, if you can shoot one bullet and kill someone, you don’t use keep shoot hundreds of bullets, and if you can stop a threat with bullets, you don’t launch a rocket at it.
Israel doesn’t launch rockets at people next to the border. And tries to avoid killing unarmed people (for example by aiming for the legs). I assume every sane military does the same. Killing unarmed people, besides obviously being immoral, is bad strategically as well.
(This comment deals with a specific paragraph, and not the actual interesting issue raised by this article, which is not unique to Israel I presume, and is practiced by all military industries capable of building such weapons today)
EDIT: well, I had it coming. I didn’t mean for it to become the classic Israel vs Palestinians flame war - just wanted to point out the realities of borders, wars and weapons which I suspect most HN readers are not exposed to. But again, I should have seen this coming. :(
1. Did a human die? Yes.
2. Was it caused by another human, directly or indirectly? Yes.
3. Did the perpetrator intend for a human to die? Yes.
Yeah, I'd call that murder.
The rest of us will ignore you, however. Personally I think your definition is evil, not just wrong.
(Why? At least because it hurts their cause.)
I respectfully disagree, Israel is an occupation force, has overwhelming power (military, economical and diplomatic) and they do kill grown people and children almost without prejudice. Some official numbers (I suspect it is even worse in reality):
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208380/
P.S. I don't condone violence on both sides, eternal war like one in Palestine/Israel is horrible (I've lived through 4 years of war, believe me a day of it is too much), but I really don't like political correctness, where we must have "balance" in reporting, but it is completely clear who holds the keys of peace and who has the finger on the trigger)
At no point I’m saying there’s not casualties, including civilian casualties, including horrible mistakes, including trigger happy psychos that make it through the ranks.
But the imbalance of casualties is the result of Israel being better at it.
It would be great if there was peace. But even if I ran Israel and the Palestinian Territories as a dictatorship tomorrow I still wouldn’t be able to turn all violence to zero.
Personally, as an Israeli I would love for Israel to evacuate settlements. But pretending that would bring peace is not even naive, it just doesn’t align with anything anyone involved is saying.
There is no easy solution for that conflict, but killing more people and holding millions of people in de facto concentration camp sure wont help it.
It sounds as if you have an idea that Israel could just make it all go away in a day if they’d like. I would love to know what you think that move would be.
I agree with you that no one can make it go away in a day, and that is a big problem. Every day of the conflict causes more pain, more casualties, and expands vicious circle of violence.
I guess that current generations are lost cause, as long as we always frame it into "us vs them", "we are good, enemy is bad", the conflict will never end.
Maybe the solution is one state, with citizens, not religious groups, maybe it is two states (dunno if that is even possible at this point).
Also, extreme conditions in Gaza and West Bank don't help. Imagine if young people there have an option to go to real university, have a nice job, a house. Would they be willing to blow themselves, killing many innocent people. (Not to say poverty is the primary cause of attacks, but that level of desperation certainly doesn't help)
Don't wish or do anything to other people which you wouldn't want for yourself. Imo, that should be a good start. To change the world one must start from himself.
They do. They are known to go to extreme lengths to avoid harming civilians, including calling up before bombing, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombing ahead of actual bombing etc.
And why are they bombing civilian neighborhoods in the first place: because that's were Hamas puts their rocket lauchers. That is a war crime too, and it is worse, because the only reason they do it is to attract attacks towards civilian areas; tactically those rocket attacks are just dumb - they only serve to get media coverage when Israel find they have had enough of it and flatten it.
Instead they keep doing this stupid inbetween thing that helps nobody but the weapon manufactures, and those who like to hurt humans.
Granted neither of those options could be done in a day, but peace in two years seems about as good a solution as any, no?
So if you were wondering why they do this "stupid inbetween thing" instead, now you know.
It doesn’t sound like Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
- Hamas deliberately launch rockets from densely populated areas and from hospitals. This is a war crime as big as anything Israel has done in recent years.
- Israel goes out of their way to avoid harming civilians: often calling affected areas on phone, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombs that go off over rooftops and after that do they bomb the area.
Regarding who hold the keys to peace, and who has their finger on the trigger, I think the government glorifying and paying people who sneak into towns and slaughter sleeping families with knives is a pretty big impediment to peace.
And this somehow mean "almost without prejudice"?
To me it's exactly the opposite - Israel can do what they want, and yet, they aren't. They are barely harming the Palestinians (compare casualty figures to ANY other conflict).
On the other hand Palestinians (mainly Hamas and other groups in Gaza) are attacking as hard as they possibly can.
So why do you think Israel has the key to peace here? Seems to me it's exactly the opposite.
This doesn't make bullets any less lethal. If a bullet damages your femoral artery, you'll bleed out in minutes if not seconds.
It definitely make it less lethal. Your chances of dying from a well aimed bullet to the legs are an order of magnitude less than a well aimed bullet for the head or chest.
In case it’s unclear: Aiming for the legs would be an option for an unarmed person approaching the Israeli Gaza border, and not yielding to instructions, or warning shots. There’s generally not any other good options if your goal is to keep your border protected, and protect your forces against such events being used as diversions for a real attack, which is why it’s a common tactic.
It also remains the only moral option, but of course this assumes you consider other people to be humans - given that members of the Stern gang became impotent members of the Israeli government, I am basically convinced that the Isreali government does not, though some individuals do.
In fact someone in the same boot camp as me got a 7.62 through his thigh after he didn't get the notice and wandered around between the targets as people started shooting. He survived with no lasting injuries. Extremely lucky but still.
Source: I got most of my small arms training on G3s which are 7.62.
I think you are wrong. most countries do a terrible job of efficiently- or even effectively- defending borders. I'm not making a political statement, but just look how many illegal immigrants get into US, EU, etc. Even Israel, which is relatively small, has to invest vast resources into maintaining their fences. Please note, i don't want to be dragged into a political discussion, i'm simply explaining why i think your are wrong.
That's not inefficient/ineffective, the system is just optimized for different things. It ensures a cheap and compliant labor force for things like agriculture.
If we narrow the discussion to borders that aren’t very peaceful, there aren’t many successful solutions. It looks like “nothing gets through” works, but “only approved traffic gets through” doesn’t work.
Autonomous weapon systems are no different. They raise the deterrence factor so that you are not likely to be attacked by simply having the capability and your adversary knowing that you have the capability.
This is something i've always found weird... Nukes arguably make the world safer by your definition one but particular country gets to decide who is safe and who gets a free conversion to democracy.
Its maddening.
It depends on who has them and how they use them.
Autonomous weapon systems are (theoretically) much more precise and don't leave radioactive destruction in their wake (unless they are nuclear-armed autonomous weapons systems--that's a terrifying thought).
The greater precision and less permanent nature means they are more likely to be used offensively rather than just held in strategic reserve as most nuclear arsenals are.
What makes nukes unique, and MAD work, is the simple observation known to every nation: if one country decides to nuke another, there's nothing anyone can do about this - once the decision is made and the button is pressed, the other country turns into glass. But since nukes fly longer than the time it takes to detect and launch a retaliation strike, no one dares to launch first because they'll get glassed too, and there's also nothing anyone can do about it.
Conventional weapons, autonomous or not, can't unleash destruction at necessary scale and certainty.
There are quite a few countries that have nukes now, and not just half a dozen little ones. For example, India has SSBNs.
Like with a minefield, morally fine when marked, very immoral if not marked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
Without even getting into the other aspects of Hezbollah's occupation of lebanon.
People reading this, feeling confused, and think this is an actual discussion. Please go on and read about the topic on wikipedia.
Is it unthinkable that at least some Palestinians would resort to defending themselves after their homes were stolen and while being under constant threat of extermination?
You’re right that it doesn’t compare. Colonisers have always been far more brutal than any response they received.
nobody fires those rockets for fun, either. the casualty rate among the people doing it (and any civilians who happen to be in the area) is much higher than that of their targets.
It might deter some percentage, but considering how many people gladly accept certain death, an increased chance of death isn't a big hurdle.
I'm just thinking in terms of technology and possible outcomes, from a purely pragmatic point of view. You might have just started reading my post by trying to guess which side I was more likely to be on, and then confirmation bias may have just caused you to interpret the way I said things to validate that guess. (I could easily see someone also coming to the opposite conclusion from that post, for example. But you and they would both be wrong.)
I don't think the language I used was "othering". I just think sometimes some things are talked about from an abstract, realpolitik-esque, mechanistic perspective, and sometimes things are talked about from a human and moral perspective. It's only a problem if you're trying to do the latter and you end up sounding like the former.
However, you do make a valid point. I only brought up the afterlife component, but due to what you say, they may feel cornered, like they have less to lose and are making a last stand of sorts, which might further bolster determination and willingness to risk death. So that's another factor.
It's besides the point of the discussion, but I overwhelmingly support the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestine conflict and agree with your comments on the matter. Of course I sympathize with people struggling in desperation. I don't think it's offensive, or a stereotype, or untrue, to say that many of them are more okay with dying because they believe death isn't permanent and that the afterlife will be a positive experience. I think that's just a fact which carries no value judgment.
Of course, I understand that even if they thought death were permanent, they still may brazenly risk death to fight for their cause, but my point was that the belief that it isn't permanent even further increases that determination to face death.
This is just a thread about AI, not about politics, which is why I made it about AI.
There is a strong movement for banning anti-personnel mines precisely because they are horrific weapons that kill and maim indiscriminately.
The problem with mines is less that they are indiscriminate and more that they outlast their battles.
https://www.un.org/disarmament/anti-personnel-landmines-conv...
Also there are 32 countries that refused - sadly no surprises who that actually is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Ottawa_...
It's going to be difficult for you to find many people who agree with this assertion.
Most people awknowledge the necessity of self defense, and many others who agree with the death or penalty agree with the idea of death as punishment for certain classes of crimes.
Now there's an argument to be made about a judicial process being followed or the issue with unintended consequences/blowback but it's a hard sell to your average person that a brutal dictator shouldn't be killed.
If I were to characterize any part of Korea as a “dystopia”, it wouldn’t be the part that defends itself with robot machine guns. Indeed, the robot machine guns were invented to protect South Korea from falling under the dystopia that has overrun the North.
If you believe what the CIA says about other countries, you’ll believe lots of lies.
Would you rather be in North Korea or South Korea?
NK with destroy them with guided artillery or something similar right before attempting an invasion.
So no, they don't serve that purpose.
Once you have two sides with automated offensive capability, we are one bug away from the kind of mistakes that, during the Cold War, were intercepted by humans in the loop. I'm not sure how this can NOT end badly.
I think this will further reduce conflict between advanced nations (robots killing robots just becomes a stalemate) and will intensely escalate any asymmetric conflicts where one advanced nation can crush whoever without having to pay the price of deploying humans (think CIA drone strikes).
Of course we will. It's not as though they're programming themselves. Somebody has to tell the computer what to do.
We program our robots with our prejudices[1]. If you don't control the machines, you can't change their programming. It's entirely possible that such prejudices are cemented through machines that cannot be influenced or changed except through actions of their owners.
What happens when the owners of these machines are indifferent towards, or outright supportive of, prejudice? History is rife with owners of companies, industries and governments exploiting and furthering prejudice for their own benefit.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/judicial/publications/jud...
Atomic weapons are forties technology, and even nations as locked down, and downtrodden like North Korea, or Israel (as it was in sixties) can not only make one, but seemingly genuinely capable of keeping it hidden against modern spy, and nuclear detection tech.
And nuclear weapons aren't a binary either. North Korea has demonstrated the actual bomb, but their delivery systems are still far from reliable. Their rockets might technically have the range to threaten the US, but what are the chances they could actually hit their target? And how many launch vehicles do they realistically have? Not likely enough to seriously threated any other nuclear powers. And this after making decades of enormous political and economic sacrifices to pursue nuclear weapons. I don't think most countries will feel tempted to follow their lead.
Much more relevant theatre range weapons are things even NK can manufacture. I was very surprised to learn that North Korea not only designed a working cruise missile with their economy, but had a working terrain hugging flight on it.
If you dropped a bomb of a certain type and strength on a random coordinate in <country> how many people do you kill on average?
A 1Mt device might only have a 50% chance of killing 1+ people if detonated at the proper altitude at a random location within the US, (47% of the US is uninhabited) but average 1000 deaths (~6mi lethal radius, US overall population density of 90p/sqmi).
Defining an area as a kill zone and a bomb that is dropped on a particular area aren't all that different.
They are.
And a centralized AI will be needed to coordinate all of the autonomous weapon systems and react faster than the bad guys--SkyNet is coming too.
Why?
At a tactical level, an AI to coordinate a battlefield makes sense. (Speed of light means local computing has an advantage, particularly with directed energy weapons.) And an AI to advise on strategy, and coördinate those battlefield AIs, makes sense.
But while battles are mechanical, war is political. At the point that the human becomes replaceable we’d have an AI substitute for government, which is a long way away.
For grand strategic concerns, we have nukes, and those still fly slowly and detectably enough that an AI commanding counterstrike is unnecessary. (Unless submarine platforms become detectable and thus destroyable in a first strike.)
A culture has computer simulated war and “casualties” must report to euthanasia chambers.
This was the end result agreed to to stop actual bombings.
Of course, the officers disrupt it in the end. But it’d be interesting if they returned and nothing was left but craters.
More on topic, iron dome is an automated missile interception system and works well to protect Israelis from missile attacks. Just because a system is automated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea, but obviously there’s high risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
This topic is too political to have a nuanced internet discussion and quickly dissolved into weird anti-semitism most of the time.
https://samharris.org/podcasts/why-dont-i-criticize-israel/
How is it better to only respond with proportionate responses? If you were known as generally a good country, but could go mad at the drop of a hat, other countries would take even more steps to avoid harming you, wouldn't they?
At the same time, if you were known of flattening neighborhods or even entire cities, your enemies wouldn't be able to hide among civilians.
In either case you trade of more deaths now, for fewer dead in the future.
As horrible as it sounds, either the losing side needs to accept reality and concede (disbanding UNRWA would be a giant step in the right direction to force that issue), or the war should resume, and the gloves and restraints need to come off, until one or the other side sues for peace.
This is the only way to end this conflict. Otherwise it is going to simmer forever. Without the cost for continuing the conflict being made very high, it will continue. The cost for Israel to protect its citizens is very high. The cost for launching attacks against Israelis needs to be disproportionately high for a change in political approach to be considered.
Aside from that, the real issue is that the irrational side has not yet conceded that they lost their war, 70+ years ago, against the rational actor, who had established a state. They instigated that war, as they did not wish the rational actor to have that state. They are aided in their irrationality by various NGOs, and have managed to perpetuate and sustain their presumed victimhood, by attacking, with literal impunity, the rational actor.
Now, here, you are suggesting that maybe, the rational actor should be restricted in their response to the irrational actor as it may bring the rational actor to the negotiating table. Which of course, completely neglects all the times the rational actor sat at the negotiating table with the irrational actor, hammered things most of the way out, and watched the irrational actor breach every single agreement.
So ...
What we have here has nothing to do with rational actor deciding enough is enough, and developing tech to reasonably neutralize the threat the irrational actor poses. Arguing against this de minimus effort, as it might bring the rational actor back to the table (in your mind) if they had to rely on sticks and stones ... is pretty much the definition of ludicrous.
The rational actor has tried, for 70+ years, to get the irrational actor to work with it. And has been met with bloodshed, the irrational actor targeting civilians, which, is a real war crime, as compared to the BS alleged by the irrational actor, in their attempt to get the world to ostracize the rational actor.
Exactly how, would this time be different? What would the irrational actor offer to jump start discussions? Because it is obvious from the last 70+ years that the underlying thesis of "land for peace" has not worked.
A different approach was, and is needed. As much as I hate giving Trump credit, what he did was to change the parameters, which allowed other nations to get off the ledge with the irrational actor. This is, in turn, putting pressure on the irrational actor to begin acting rationally. Those actions need to continue.
This all said, implying you wish to disarm a people who have armed themselves specifically to prevent mass slaughter at the hands of a losing side irrational non-nation state actor ... yeah ... not really a sound argument in any context.
The one response I'll give your perspective is: I think a better way of framing it is organized vs fragmented as opposed to rational vs irrational. Israel has a stable, empowered, central authority, while Palestine does not. To call the latter simply 'irrational' ignores the fact that it isn't a single entity, and may be composed of many rational actors with differing incentives. Even a single person can act rationally at all points in time and still appear irrational over some window. The more chaotic an environment, the less rational it's constituents will appear over a given window of time or geography.
Israel depends on several things to be true and any one or two of them being false probably means end of state
1. Israel has much stronger economy than neighboring states. Hi tech army is expensive 2. Strong internal cohesion with no widespread protests/division or civil war. 3. Modern weapons systems are exclusively available to Israel 4. Strong US support with both money and political cover 5. Arabs not becoming majority in Israel thru demographics 6. Arab states continue to be in shitty state
Specifically
3 may not be true for long with China investing in military capabilities 4 is not assured with woke anti-colonialism ideology and AOC/Tlaib/Ilhan increasing influence on Dem party.
All Palestinians need to do is not to give up. Israel need to win every single time as there is no recovery from loss.
There is argument that strategically Israel is at the strongest moment and it can get most concessions from Palestinians now. In future it may end up in much worse bargaining position.
Sometimes, it is really impossible to talk some sense to some people. It’s just very hard to accept for us, but it just is, and history has proved that sometimes force is , unfortunately, the wisest choice.
You also clearly don't understand what path would lead someone to resort to suicide bombing if you think you can reduce it to "a pure act of hate". These are desperate people who have been brainwashed to the point that they think they would bring more net worth to the world by blowing themselves and their surroundings up than living on. What would help "talk sense" to people is to stop engaging in illegal invasive wars that (intentionally or unintentionally) destabilise their region.
Enemy may call you terrorist, but if it is your country you are freedom fighter.
Not continue to take other people's land and not making their live worse in cunning way is also wise.
Why would the Israeli government want to do anything to resolve the Palestinian situation when they gain so much from allowing it to continue at a low level?
In that case you broke the site guidelines by replying, and so perpetuating the flamewar, leading to hellish places like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26460291. Please note:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
That's our version of "Please don't feed the trolls". The GP comment was egregious and deservedly flagged. Discussion can and should stop there. It's the reasonable and/or semi-reasonable replies to egregious comments that actually turn these threads into conflagrations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't have defense you go on offense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a massive difference between guns on automated fire control and an AI aiming missiles.
One could argue that, by making the fire control guaranteed, the border might stop being challenged and deaths thus go down. (Nobody to taunt, either.)
Landmines work by the same principle. Many killed by landmines are children.
> 87% of the casualties were civilians and 47% were children (less than 18 years old).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mine#Casualties
Not really. Mine fields are not certain death. They don’t always have the opportunity to announce themselves. Guns on automated fire control have the option of announcing themselves prior to engaging. They can also be turned off, something not easy to do with mines.
It’s painful but necessary to note that Hamas have a track record of weaponising children [1]. A child approaching the border is thus not guaranteed safe, and could reasonably be fired upon by a human or a gun on automated fire control. (Not arguing for killing kids. Just that “kids could get killed” isn’t an effective argument against this weapons platform.)
War is terrible. I don’t think automatic guns make it significantly more terrible. (Landmines do.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers...
That makes no sense to me. Children being killed by landmines is an example of a lack of fire control. If the land mine had fire control it could detect enemy soldiers then children wouldn't have to die.
In particular, you don't set up a few thousand roboguns and then leave them there when the conflict is over, which is responsible for most of the civilian deaths you're referring to, including those of children.
Except it's not a border, it's more like a massive concentration camp. Plus, the kill zone is hundreds of meters inwards.
Its time governments around the world invest in quality gamers to help them fight their battles.
I can't help but think, in a war between two nations fighting exclusively with such tech (not too far fetched for my generation or my kids generation), war itself becomes comical and essentially a measure of economic strength. How quickly can you build these robots and how quickly can you deploy them.
Imagine a general shouting orders over a bunch of acne-faced teenagers trying to win a war for his country.
I don't think the problem is with AIs acurrately identifying friends and enemies. You can't solve that 100% anyway, but if it can aid humans and prevent mistakes, all the better. The problem is when you start to build absolutely relentless border drones that can one-shot the enemy, without any possibility for mercy or negotiation.
With weapons, the desired outcome is not to kill, not in most circumstances anyway. In circumstances where it is, it is almost always the desire of an individual wielding a weapon. Normally, the desired outcome is deterrence or defense, and when used proactively, to lessen the enemy's ability to continue to wage the conflict. With deterrence, the threat of death is the deterrent, with defense, killing is the machanism by which the threat is neutralized, and with proactive aggression the goal may or may not include killing, and is more likely to include killing if the enemy's ability to wage conflict is dependent on manpower. In all three scenarios, the desired outcome of developing autonomous military capability is to save lives.
Also, having people in the loop reminds at least someone that this is 'real' and that we need to carry on thinking about it. If you can obliterate enemies' bodies and the only duty on people is to restock the ammo I think that reduces the moral burden of conflict in an unacceptable way.
One maybe stupid example is when there were lots of Syrian refugees on the way through Europe in 2015. We learned the hard way that, if people are pushing against your borders, the only way to keep them out is to eventually use force. We were not willing to do so, so we had to accept that and grant people asylum (which I think was the right decision).
Imagine (a bit scifi but for the sake of argument) "border patrol 2000", which will give a warning, then give a more stern warning, then raise a wall, then try rubber bullets, then try to keep you from climbing the wall with a grappling arm, and finally using live rounds. If you are really determined it will eventually have to shoot. Human solderies did shoot in the past but they did also sometimes not shoot, and it always had a political aftermath. But with automatic systems, it is too easy to psychologically detach, and to say it's e.g. the refugees own fault.
It wasn't always like this, Gaza had an airport, free travel to Israel and Egypt, etc. But the majority in Gaza has voted for Hamas, an extremist party which calls for the annihilation of Israel, so for now all Israel can do is watch the border closely and thwart attacks.
It is also telling that Egypt allows no traffic over the border while Israel typically allow tens of semi trailers a day of food an humanitarian aid as long as they can ensure weapons aren't smuggled in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing
> The Palestinians agreed that all imports of goods are diverted to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, because Israel threatened to exclude Gaza from the customs union out of concern about the implementation of the Paris Protocol.
If you had a bad neighbor, which has intentions to build bombs in his basement, you'd damn sure try to restrict what goes into his basement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-gaza-homes/a...
> Israel tightly limits the flow of concrete, cement, iron bars and other materials into Gaza, as “dual use” items that could have a military purpose if they were seized by Hamas to rebuild tunnels used to launch attacks.
> That means few homes have been rebuilt despite international pledges of billions for reconstruction. Rather than wait to rebuild permanent homes, some relief agencies have decided to build temporary structures with materials they can get.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2019/04/17/w...
> The adverse effect of dual-use restrictions is mostly felt in manufacturing, ICT and agriculture. The agriculture sector contributes significantly to Palestinian food security; however, the dual use restrictions have lowered the concentration of active chemicals in fertilizers making them less effective and lowering land productivity to half of that in Jordan and only 43 percent of the yield in Israel.
> For example, the restriction on ‘communications equipment, communications supporting equipment, equipment containing communication functions’, limits access to modern manufacturing production lines, spare parts, medical equipment and home appliances. It has also stood in the way of developing the Palestinian ICT sector and created a large technological gap with neighboring countries.
It looks a lot like collective punishment.
> Concrete used to build attack tunnels - restrict concrete.
> Burning old tires used as smoke mask to attack border - restrict import of used tires.
> Helium balloons used as incendiary devices - restrict Helium supply.
Those are all real examples from the last few years, btw.
Edit: Basic necessities to sustain life - food, water, medicines are allowed. No need for hyperbole.
If you had a bad neighbor, you would do the same.
Food - could be used to feed combatants!
Medicine - could be used to treat combatants!
Consider the possibility that "you're not allowed to build houses for your families because we won't let the materials in" potentially inflames more terrorism than it stops.
edit: Regarding your edit, "Edit: Basic necessities to sustain life - food, water, medicines are allowed."
Shelter is considered one of the basic necessities.
> If you had a bad neighbor, you would do the same.
If I had a bad neighbor, and I walled them in and forbade them from buying concrete and fertilizer, the police would likely intervene in their favor.
Have my upvote.
I think my point still stands.
Imagine if the military forces of Myanmar had this kind of robots and decided to deploy them during civil protests...
It’s easier to kill civilians and blame it on a bug than to admit that someone ordered the attack.
Basically, this seems like a terrible idea, and will enable futher distancing between crime/action and responsibility.
The reason to dislike these machines is because of the practical problem of making sure they only target bad-guys. That said... their continued development and deployment is essentially inevitable anyway.
I don't think a hypothetical requiring time travel to obtain 20/20 hindsight is a very reasonable basis for discussion here.
I don't like the idea of these devices very much, I see the problem with controlling them. But there's no way to stop them from being created. The required technologies are too pervasive and reproducible.
We think it would. We thought that about knocking off Saddam Hussein, but the resulting power vacuum killed a lot more than he ever did and gave rise to ISIS.
It turns out predicting "if we kill this guy, it's good" can be far more difficult than you're making it out to be. Hell, we don't even know if killing Hitler would've been good; it might've given rise to someone far more competent.
We killed Hitler and it's been a net good because we're still in Germany making sure 80 years later. If we'd planned for something similar in Iraq we might not have fucked it up so badly.
It does imply this if it's in the exact context of the Gestapo and Stasi and surveillance technology.
Funny how referencing Godwin's law as a joke is flag-worthy, but unironically comparing people to Nazis isn't.
Automated ‘Robo-Snipers’ set up along the Gaza border, designed to create “automated kill-zones” at least 1.5 km deep. But they aren’t merely robotic guns. The turrets feature heavy duty 7.62 calibre machine guns tied into a network spanning the entire border. If any turret detects human movement, the entire chain of guns can train their sights and concentrate firepower on the interloper. Some turrets are also able to fire explosive rockets.”
Literally created to destroy a population they already control at will. If this were China people would be up in arms, but because it’s Israel I have to make a private account to post comfortably.
The idea is the same - war should not be sanitized, because it removes pressure to constrain them.
It's important that the cost of war is visceral to both sides.
This seems like the real threat to me. The ethics of outright autonomous weapons have a straightforward solution, at least in theory: giving the order to deploy them is precisely morally equivalent to pulling the trigger yourself. A flying bullet is a simpler system than an autonomous network of machine guns, but you still set it in motion and are responsible for its path. No, the tricky part is when you can't tell who set it in motion.
Also the joystick control is kind of LOL. Give her a mouse and keyboard!
https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/UA_571-C_Automated_Sentry_Gun
b) This type of weapons exists in many military industries and is bought by many countries (any country that can afford them). Making this specifically "ethical" in connection to Israel is appallingly biased.
Are you saying it is not autonomous just because there is a person in loop? Seems pretty clear that it would be easy to remove that person, making it fully autonomous, unlike a remote controlled device.
I any case, even if there was some 'autonomous' weapon (which is not the case here), what is the point of talking about autonomicity of weapons as though they are not being deployed and launched by humans.
Just give back the land already.
I have read many statements similar to this in recent months, but I haven’t come across a good analysis of how offensive drones were used/defended against (if they were) in that conflict. Anyone have a good resource?
You'll also find countless combat footage from the azeri drones destroying Armenian positions. Some are even on YouTube, most on the azeri defense ministry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xme_NTpVauU
Israel been supplying the azeris with drones for a while, and were even accused of "test firing" it on real Armenian troops themselves to impress the azeris into buying them.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-company-charged-l...