UN delay could open door to robot wars

By example, there is a long and well documented history of human rights violations against civilian population from human armies, and those violations come as often as not from the high command's orders as for the volition of individual units.

Even worse than that, there is also the well documented history of the Cold War, where nuclear war and MAD was only spared because there were individual low level officers that exercised a humane criteria and knowingly disobeyed protocol. If robots would have been in charge of nuclear defense systems during those years, we probably would not been here discussing this.

[0] Perhaps through cryptographically one-way neurolinguistic re-programming. Even Japan's conditioning by the American occupation (one of the most brutal cultural reorganizes absent enforced diaspora) seems to be waning after 70 years.

We often mark the fall of a regime at the point where its army and secret police take off their uniforms, climb down from the guard towers, and join the protest crowd (or go home). Robots can remain loyal to the central command structure to the very end.

Human police forces are liable to defect if not paid, likely to refuse suicidal engagements, and may even refuse immoral engagements. With good enough engineering, a regime's drones will remain ruthlessly efficient even when it runs out of money, is obviously on the wrong side of history, and is obviously going to lose.

I'm not sure whether the final outcomes of revolutions would change, but their endings will certainly be longer and more painful. A Berlin Wall capable of defending itself indefinitely without human intervention would not have fallen so easily.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughte...

"Not even the evidence of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, with its long sieges and trench warfare—an eerie predictor of World War I’s horrors to come—could persuade military observers of the Maxim gun’s lethality on the modern battlefield."

You're thinking like a nice person, which is the wrong approach here.

What you should be doing is, think of it as if you were Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Okay? You're Stalin. And now you're thinking "hmmm, how could I use these shiny new toys, I wonder?..."

It's not the best case scenario you should worry about, it's the other end of the stick. Security 101.

(Unless, of course, your whole post was sarcastic, in which case nevermind.)

Just imagine how this might be applied by powers like the US, Russia, Israel, and China. IMO its a recipe for increased use of force and extended violent occupations. And that's not even getting into the issue of autonomous kill decision capabilities.

False positives only matter in so far as they can generate outrage that can threaten power. So if you find a way to make absolutely sure no powerful person gets killed, which doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve, you can pretty much start shooting fish in a barrel without any adverse consequences. E.g. when Mao had his leaders fulfill quotas of persecuting so-called dissidents, whether those people were really dissidents was rather secondary. What matters is that there is a certain percentage that is unemployed, starving, and/or hunted by killer robots; that in itself does wonders to keep people in line, and the people who aren't directly under attack have a huge capacity to rationalize and ignore things, if that's what it takes to not be attacked. If we can accept people needlessly starving we can accept people being killed by a random number generator no problem.

I wish I was being snarky, and I hope for nothing more than to be proven wrong, but absent radical changes, that's what I see in our future. "A boot stamping on a human face, forever" is not a still frame, it's a process, and unless that process is stopped for good, that human face will become infinitely thin and infinitely helpless.