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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

There's been a flurry of Military related posts on HN the last few days. Not complaining, I love talking/writing about this stuff. But I have to point it out that I've noticed.

So, are folks submitting more of those articles or is there something about the cultural zeitgeist right now that pushes people who frequent HN to up-vote them?

Perhaps more directly: Are people becoming more afraid about the Military co-opting advances in tech for use in Warfare?

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Generally its the opposite, technology developed by the military is co-opted by the civilian sector.

Anyways all these new "AI" memes don't change anything, the weapons are just as lethal as they are today. All that's changing is more and more personal is no longer needed in the field and can be seated behind a desk. For the foreseeable future humans will still be involved in the decision to engage (kill) someone. When the day comes and robots will decide who they want to engage without a human in the loop, than we should really be afraid.

I think it raises questions about the rules of engagement if all your deployments are unmanned.

I think this is something that needs to be more deeply explored, especially if we're going to start using software to do things like "acquire targets." Now, lots of "deployments" for folks that fly Drones aren't deployments in the traditional sense of the word (they aren't in the combat zone). But...how will this work when you're part of a team that runs a semi-autonomous killing machine?

Software has been used to acquire targets for a long time. This excerpt on the F14 shows the original radar had a "single target track - auto acquisition" mode: https://books.google.com/books?id=knvVwLX6mFMC&pg=PA245&lpg=...

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