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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I know you are being a little facetious with the Death Star line, but I think that bares a distinction because it would be a WMD and part of its intended purpose is to kill civilians. Likewise in our world developing indiscriminate killing WMDs like bio-weapons deserves extra scrutiny. Drones are not indiscriminate killing machines any more than manned aircraft. If they are used indiscriminately, the problem should be with the leadership ordering their use in that manner.

My overall point is that drones are not a unique class of weapon. You should either have a problem with Google working on a weapons program or not. Working on drones is no worse than working on manned aircraft.

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It’s “purpose” is to protect the empire - it is a tool.

It’s intended as a deterrent.

Repeat indefinitely for all “tools”

(There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to it. The empire did nothing wrong)

You can Always justify making a bigger better gun or “tool”.

Don’t make tools you wouldn’t want used against you.

Tech engineers in particular are more than normally exposed to the ideas of weapons and responsibility of creators for their creations.

Dodging that is the opposite of being a coder/nerd.

Or, perhaps, the optimal survival strategy of a nation-state is to make the thing you don't want used against you until it becomes so onerous that international standards move to ban it.

Gas warfare was banned after WWI, but during WWI, both allies and central powers used it before it was banned. Nuclear weapons are banned... After the Allies used them twice.

International bans on intolerable weapons are a great idea. Unilateral disarmament of a useful weapon with no international ban may be suicidal.

Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft, and with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone. So yes, it is potentially worse than aircraft, for the same reason a police/army of bots could potentially be much worse than a "conventional" one.

>Drones can be produced and deployed in higher quantities than aircraft

Once again that is a political issue. If someone finds a way to suddenly reduce the cost of bullets by 50%, the response from the military shouldn’t be to buy twice the number of bullets.

>with AI you won't necessarily need one man behind each drone

The article denies that is how the AI would be used.

Just a matter of time.

Regrettably, in the world as it is, we need--extraordinarily--competent people working on our weapons of mass destruction, too (in particular, nuclear command and control). Not a job I'd want, and not one I'm happy exists, but one I'm sure grateful someone is doing.

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