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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

> But what if an adversary allows their robots to fire without waiting for human permission? The first side to do so would gain a critical advantage, and we cannot have an autonomy gap.

You're making the bold assumption that the robots will actually work, instead of wasting ammunition on all the wrong targets, including friendlies. I'm pretty sure the first side to allow fully autonomous weapons will do so before the technology is ready (humans are never patient enough to wait until the technology is ready) and end up regretting it.

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> You're making the bold assumption that the robots will actually work, instead of wasting ammunition on all the wrong targets, including friendlies

I could easily imagine the US military deploying autonomous combat bots to some middle-eastern country unaccompanied by human troops. They would care approximately zero about wasted ammo, and we already know from our drone strike policy what the military thinks about accidentally killing non-combatants. As long as there are no Americans around to get killed by rogue bots, it doesn't really matter how much collateral damage they cause, within reason.

The US military may not care whether their toys work or not, but that doesn't mean they will be gaining a critical advantage from not caring, just as accidentally droning non-combatants hasn't given them a critical advantage.

It gets them the critical advantage of consolidating power at home through more money (via more military-related contracts), which "more money" oftentimes equates with more political power (at least in Western-like societies). The "more power" part has always been an end in itself.

> You're making the bold assumption that the robots will actually work, instead of wasting ammunition

I'm pretty skeptical the U.S. military is concerned about wasted ammunition. They waste so much on training and preparation that anything wasted in combat is minimal.

> I'm pretty sure the first side to allow fully autonomous weapons will do so before the technology is ready

It doesn't have to be autonomous to be deployed before it's ready. Iran managed to should down a civil aircraft based on human error. The U.S. has done the same decades earlier. Clearly there were either technology or human process problems, I suspect that autonomous military robots will follow this trend.

There have also been instances during the war in Iraq where human soldiers clearly had no problem shooting civilians.

It's not something that's unique to autonomous systems, though I suppose it might terrify some people a bit more than when it's humans doing it.

>I'm pretty skeptical the U.S. military is concerned about wasted ammunition. They waste so much on training and preparation that anything wasted in combat is minimal.

They may not care about the ammunition itself so much but they care about budget and combat effectiveness. It's not uncommon to have training be missed due to ammunition budget shortfalls and a robot without ammunition isn't terribly effective.

Maybe that makes sense for some applications though, like a landmine?

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