Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
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Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#2If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there.
If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there.
Why is the latter worse than the former ?
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#3If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
They can both be bad.
One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.
"No quarter" is a war crime.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#4I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.
These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#5If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
Willingness to play.
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#6I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment. These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#7If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
They can both be bad. One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could. "No quarter" is a war crime.
This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#8If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
Seriously, what sort of fuckwit downvoted this ?
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#9I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment. These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.
Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.
I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.
On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.
Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.
Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.
Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#10If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
> Why is the latter worse than the former ?
I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.
That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.