South Korea has something similar.
How can anybody work on this sort of technology and still feel OK about themselves?
I'd much rather work on Facebook, which at least provides some tangible benefit to me as an occasional event organizer in exchange for wasting my time and trying to sell me crap, than this. Hell, I'd work on XKEYSCORE before working on this, and that's an extremely strong statement coming from me.
First, masses of innocent people don't usually charge at borders of countries with which they are technically at war. Second, this is not a "gun see, gun kill" technology. There are humans involved and I'm pretty sure the level of automation is directly related to the assumed probability of border being attacked. In more peaceful times, it will be almost all manual. In a full fledged war - mostly automated. You can't afford to be sentimental when your country is being invaded.
Remote controlled guns do not kill people 'indiscriminately'.
There is technically a war on between North and South Korea, and tensions are high. It's responsible to have defences in place given the fact that 500 000 N. Korean soldiers could decided one day to come rolling in.
The moral implications of the management of violence are real, but it's often necessary.
In a more limited case: you're a cop, a guy robbed a bank, he has a gun, he's running at you pulls up his gun and aims it you. Do you shoot? You could kill a man. You do and he dies. Are you 'guilty of murder'? Or have you actually done a 'moral act'?
I'm personally weary of all this border stuff, but the underlying motivation of basic security is real. That said, I don't think there are any reasons for weapons at the US border, surely there are criminal gangs but mostly I'd imagine it's just people.
If the US were to have had it's border problems solved 'normally' - over a long period of time and managed issues as they came up, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's all due to a dereliction of responsibility over a period of time.
The inability of the US to just put 'normal' and 'basic' controls at it's border over time has caused massive political upheaval, to the point wherein I don't think a guy like Trump would have been elected were things to have been done properly. So now you have crazy politics, and crazy border proposals. Now the pendulum has swung a little too far.
So this is all a symptom of the governments inability to operate normally and deal with such problems normally. This never needed to happen. But here we are.
Automated defenses will attack North Korean troops. They could also attack lost North Korean children, South Korean military convoys moving to the new front 50 miles north a week after the bombing of Seoul in 2034, and hikers living in Unified Korea in 2067.
"Indiscriminate" doesn't necessarily mean "unjustified" or "illegal", but it's still enough of a marked category difference to be worth some separate ethical consideration.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-pentagon-is-buil...
I know the above sounds kinda hyperbolic, but there is a lot of substantiated stuff in there that doesn't need much extrapolation to have the potential to go reeeeeally bad at, well, the flip of a switch, political or otherwise.
[http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/asia/north-korea-spies/ind...] > Spies and human intelligence play a big role in maintaining Kim Jong Un's regime.
NK "does not care" about security measures at SK borders.
[http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1329421/north-korean-s...] > Nearly half of all North Korean spies arrested in South Korea over the past 10 years entered the country disguised as defectors, said a South Korean lawmaker on Friday.
SK "does not need" to engage in reassurance countermeasures because of the population.
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/south-...] > Residents of South Korea who have friends abroad often share inside jokes about how outsiders are way more alarmed than everyone here, who would actually be wiped out if Kim Jong-un ever ordered a nuclear attack on this country.
</sarcasm>
Depending on your point of view, that wall protected the outside from the inside, the inside from the outside, or the inside from the inside.
The Nazis (the real kind, not the Internet name calling kind) were working on an atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is a pretty good example of "if I don't do it someone else will".
It presupposes that we need weapons of every variety in an ever-increasing arms race, which is the very action under examination.
I would agree that doesn't necessarily end the argument instantly; the "instant win because I said 'Nazi' first" button is several decades past its best-by date. But on the other hand it's not something you're going to have much success with dismissing with "So what?" either.
I don't believe that our nuclear program ended up having any bearing on the European theater -- and the existence of our nuclear program might have (if we're conjecturing timelines) convinced the Germans to make an honest go at it rather than a sabotaged one.
We don't know how this timeline would play out again, either, and so we can't discuss how such a change would (likely) have played out.
Instead, we have to act from principles.
Appealing to "well, what about literal Nazis, huh?" is the worst sort of conversation shutting down -- it did absolutely nothing to stop literal Nazis and your hypothetical Nazis are just that, complete fiction you made up to try and justify your point. You literally invented a story to explain why other stories shouldn't be used as evidence.
> Most people consider "The Nazis are more likely to win the war" to be a substantial entry on the debit side of the ledger.
Completely unsupported supposition of the shallowest variety.
> But on the other hand it's not something you're going to have much success with dismissing with "So what?" either.
How about:
"Your fanfic about how nukes stop Nazis is no more useful for rational debate than mine where not building nukes ended the war early by revealing US moral superiority and breaking German morale, then went on to prevent the Cold War, the formation of a Soviet Bloc, the attrocities across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America."
Your argument doesn't even deserve a "So what?"
It's an outright fallacy of emotional, Nazi based appeal. (Despite your disclaimer at the bottom.)
The crux of why that argument is wrong is that it begs the question is precisely the same fashion, but dresses up that fallacy is faux predictive powers (eg, we can know what would happen if history changes) and emotional reaction to Nazis, which makes it wronger than the post I was originally replying to.
In all honesty, your post is so full of weasel words, it's unclear what point, if any, you're actually trying to make.