Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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