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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

I kind of agree actually. Humanity has always been at conflict with each other and will be for the foreseeable future.

But for the first time in history we have the tools to conduct intense warfare yet limit collateral damages and minimize cost in both human and material resources.

The engineers who worked on precision strike weapons/smart bombs should be applauded instead of ostracized, in the past we'd just carpet bomb the whole city to get rid of enemies, along with innocent civilians.

Obviously perpetual world peace without the need for weapons will be ideal, but I'm afraid I won't live long enough to see that day, so I'm totally fine with a more pragmatic approach at making war less costly than necessary.

If drones powered by AI can achieve that, I'm all for it.

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I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, you're correct about reduction of collateral damage.

On the other hand, weapons of old were used as part of actual wars. Precise weaponry seems to be making it too easy to kill off people without starting a war - like the US is doing with its drone strikes - which means it'll happen more. Also, I fear that the limit of precision strike weapons is being able to swiftly kill an arbitrary target anywhere, for cheap - which opens the way for ethnic cleansing, killing off political opponents, people harboring thoughts inconvenient to powerful people, etc.

Ultimately, I think precision weapons are better than blunt ones, but their development needs to happen in lock step with development of protection technologies - mostly social technologies, that would ensure those weapons can't be arbitrarily used by random politicians or countries without consequence. Unfortunately, it seems that in the last decades we've been losing social technologies - like the rule of law and trust in it.

Hmm...that's a good point. A "safer" weapon may provide more incentives for wielders to use them and less restraints may be exercised.

I guess everything is a double edged sword after all.

If it "will" happen more, then why are we seeing the opposite ? Numbers of deaths due to military conflicts has been systematically declining and drone strikes have been with us for a decade. If loosely defined, you could say they've been with us since the first precision guided missile struck (1968).

And of course there's the real can of worms that most technologies have military applications and can often even be directly weaponized. Drones being an example by themselves, but of course every source of energy is another obvious one. Add most medical discoveries, or at the very least every advance in genetics. Furthermore, say a better hashmap also helps guided munitions work faster and more precisely ...

The problem with this argument is that it is self-contradictory when you analyze it thoroughly. Furthermore, reality seems to confirm that this is contradictory.

> I fear that the limit of precision strike weapons is being able to swiftly kill an arbitrary target anywhere, for cheap - which opens the way for ethnic cleansing, killing off political opponents, people harboring thoughts inconvenient to powerful people, etc.

This a very good point. I agree with you. To prevent this requires people to be involved in our democracy. As a group, we need to elect people into office that have the proper moral and ethic values that empowers them to hold the military accountable for how they use these weapons. If this is the case, I believe that is would be EXTREMELY hard for the military to misuse these weapons.

> Humanity has always been at conflict with each other and will be for the foreseeable future.

This could be used as an excuse for pretty much anything.

> But for the first time in history we have the tools to conduct intense warfare yet limit collateral damages and minimize cost in both human and material resources.

And yet the invasion of Iraq was a tragedy on a mass scale. Also, by this logic should we supply dictators like Assad (president of Syria) drones and smart bombs next time there is a civil war so they can reduce the collateral damage of oppressing their own people?

If only Al Qaeda had had smart bombs. Then collateral damage would have been minimized /sarcasm /blackhumor

> The engineers who worked on precision strike weapons/smart bombs should be applauded instead of ostracized, in the past we'd just carpet bomb the whole city to get rid of enemies, along with innocent civilians.

Killing the civilians was the point of the bombing. Breaking the morale of the populace is an important strategy in total war (Such as WW2).

Also by this logic should we applaud white collar crooks for innovating to commit robbery without physical violence?

>Also by this logic should we applaud white collar crooks for innovating to commit robbery without physical violence?

All robberies are amoral, but not all warfare are such. Imagine if we could have precision struck Hitler with a laser guided bomb instead of having to carpet bomb Dresden.

> Humanity has always been at conflict with each other and will be for the foreseeable future.

well, it's been in decline for a while now:

https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/

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