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Comment by droopyEyelids | Hacker News Reader

And it's not just the reputation of drones, it's taking another step towards autonomous killing machines.

Robots probably wouldn't be as bad, but the other autonomous killing machines we have are pathogens, and all countries have pretty much decided it's counterproductive to develop pathogens for warfare at this point

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We already have something very close to automated killing machines: anti-aircraft missiles. Couples with radar systems they can identify hostile and go and destroy them pretty much without human guidance

The chilling aspect of drone assassinations in terms of automation is that people and subsequently devalued collateral damage is detected, ranked and classified with statistical techniques, as if regression to the mean will bring back that wedding party that just got turned into a pile of limbs with a hellfire missile.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-attacks/tw...

Better in this context means more bombs on foreheads.

My understanding was that pathogens are frowned upon because of their mutability. There is a high risk that you end up killing people you weren't targeting...namely your own citizens after your bioweapon mutates into something you don't possess a cure for.

This is not the same problem posed by AI sorting of imagery (Maven) or armed UAVs in general.

It's a lower risk but it could still happen. There's been plenty of embarrassing occasions in the last few years where automation has failed to account for black people -- facial detection and automatic door openers are two off the top of my head

Also, with automated offense, a lot of people may die in short order if you encounter a systemic failure in your targeting + execution

Not all countries. Iraq has a bioweapons program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_biological_weapons_progr... at least in 80's, and probably into 90's, and there's no indication they ever decided it to be "counterproductive", even though they abandoned it out of fear for repercussions for BWC violation. USSR had bioweapons program which it never declared "counterproductive", and even though Russian as USSR successor did, it is not really confirmed the program was effectively dismantled. There are pretty credible suspicions that Iran has an advanced stage bioweapons program, and same is suspected for North Korea. In fact, check out this list by PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/glob_nf.html - may be a bit out of date, but enough to realize "all countries have pretty much decided" is unfortunately an exaggeration.

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