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Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this.

Given a sufficiently desperate situation, I can't imagine any military with autonomous tanks taking a call to keep the autonomous shooting "disabled" when it would risk actually loosing a war.

If anyone had real ethical concerns, they would've not put a gun on a robot to begin with. Once you arm a robot, a software disable is just lipstick on a pig.

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Mines are simple robots. They kill for decades after a war. Killer tank robot is much less dangerous.

True, but it's still a slippery slope. Can't wait for the day where the decision of who to shoot is outsourced to call centre-like environments in India where people will be paid peanuts to decide who lives and dies. /s

A mine could be a lot easier to avoid in the long term.

> Mines are simple robots

These tanks are not alternative to mines. Why not take a step back and ban both? Humanity has already been trying to get rid of mines [https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/landmines/]

We can ban anything we want but countries still make them and force the hands of others to counter it. How many hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons still exist?

Just making the illegal more illegal does nothing but mollify a few here and there but certainly lets politicians grand stand as if they accomplished something.

Weapons of war deserve no mercy, since these robots will exist then the only logical solution is design systems to take them down. Weapon systems can certain be designed to take down anything mechanical and ignore people. If anything depriving the petty war mongers out there of their weapons to use against people might be the only worthwhile outcome of this technology.

They havn't really been trying that hard. Infact DARPA found a great use for the IOT

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/sh...

They only way to get rid of mines is to make them useless. Robots can make them useless, because they can spot and disarm or label mines automatically, or just step on them.

I've heard it argued that cruise missiles are robots - at least as much as a Roomba is - and hence that 'killer robots' have been with us for decades.

"This isn't a new thing! Look we already have this superficially similar thing!" is a common argument in favour of changes to the status quo, especially when people believe the change is negative. It's intellectually dishonest.

And already we have all sorts of problems with cruise missiles (fired by mistake, locking on the wrong target, misbehaving in flight...). Increasing the window of risk to ground combat is very, very risky. As the British ex-soldier quoted in TFA, even humans struggle to discern friend from foe in situations like Afghanistan or Iraq, a machine could potentially create clusterfucks of unimaginable proportions.

Not that I think someone won’t do it - if it gives even a resemblance of tactical superiority, someone will deploy it, then watch in horror as things go terribly wrong.

out of scope, but this made me laugh :

>>> clusterfucks of unimaginable proportions

Or missiles. Or torpedoes before that. Also, targeting systems on manned vehicles etc.

I do think it can be seen as a spectrum and these are quite more primitive than more autonomous and general ones with longer lifetime.

Of course, the only problem people have with this boils down to watching too many action movies starring eventual governors of California.

Predator and Reaper drones are armed, but as far as I know humans always control the weapons systems.

I guarantee they can be programmed to carry out missions without sending and receiving signals. Otherwise they can always be detected.

I don’t think you can realistically detect predator - satellite comms

Why? Obviously the satellite can detect the predator.

Unless they have a specialized directional antenna, it's simple to triangulate where the source of a signal is with drones.

They fly pretty high and the antenna points towards the sky not the ground, and yes they do use specialised antennas. You'd much easier find a predator using radar.

I'd be curious to know how is the latency handled when it comes to aiming & shooting over a satellite connection.

Watch some of the videos on youtube, it's quite interesting. You can see that the predator is able to target and track automatically so the pilot basically just has to hit the button to fire the weapons and a hit is almost guaranteed. No need to have good reflexes or low latency. The pilots are in Nevada so the best case scenario is probably 100ms pings anyway.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_...

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