Israel's autonomous 'robo-snipers' and suicide drones raise ethical dilemma
trtworld.com
trtworld.com
Once you have two sides with automated offensive capability, we are one bug away from the kind of mistakes that, during the Cold War, were intercepted by humans in the loop. I'm not sure how this can NOT end badly.
I think this will further reduce conflict between advanced nations (robots killing robots just becomes a stalemate) and will intensely escalate any asymmetric conflicts where one advanced nation can crush whoever without having to pay the price of deploying humans (think CIA drone strikes).
Of course we will. It's not as though they're programming themselves. Somebody has to tell the computer what to do.
We program our robots with our prejudices[1]. If you don't control the machines, you can't change their programming. It's entirely possible that such prejudices are cemented through machines that cannot be influenced or changed except through actions of their owners.
What happens when the owners of these machines are indifferent towards, or outright supportive of, prejudice? History is rife with owners of companies, industries and governments exploiting and furthering prejudice for their own benefit.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/judicial/publications/jud...
Atomic weapons are forties technology, and even nations as locked down, and downtrodden like North Korea, or Israel (as it was in sixties) can not only make one, but seemingly genuinely capable of keeping it hidden against modern spy, and nuclear detection tech.
And nuclear weapons aren't a binary either. North Korea has demonstrated the actual bomb, but their delivery systems are still far from reliable. Their rockets might technically have the range to threaten the US, but what are the chances they could actually hit their target? And how many launch vehicles do they realistically have? Not likely enough to seriously threated any other nuclear powers. And this after making decades of enormous political and economic sacrifices to pursue nuclear weapons. I don't think most countries will feel tempted to follow their lead.
Much more relevant theatre range weapons are things even NK can manufacture. I was very surprised to learn that North Korea not only designed a working cruise missile with their economy, but had a working terrain hugging flight on it.
If you dropped a bomb of a certain type and strength on a random coordinate in <country> how many people do you kill on average?
A 1Mt device might only have a 50% chance of killing 1+ people if detonated at the proper altitude at a random location within the US, (47% of the US is uninhabited) but average 1000 deaths (~6mi lethal radius, US overall population density of 90p/sqmi).
Defining an area as a kill zone and a bomb that is dropped on a particular area aren't all that different.
They are.
And a centralized AI will be needed to coordinate all of the autonomous weapon systems and react faster than the bad guys--SkyNet is coming too.
Why?
At a tactical level, an AI to coordinate a battlefield makes sense. (Speed of light means local computing has an advantage, particularly with directed energy weapons.) And an AI to advise on strategy, and coördinate those battlefield AIs, makes sense.
But while battles are mechanical, war is political. At the point that the human becomes replaceable we’d have an AI substitute for government, which is a long way away.
For grand strategic concerns, we have nukes, and those still fly slowly and detectably enough that an AI commanding counterstrike is unnecessary. (Unless submarine platforms become detectable and thus destroyable in a first strike.)
A culture has computer simulated war and “casualties” must report to euthanasia chambers.
This was the end result agreed to to stop actual bombings.
Of course, the officers disrupt it in the end. But it’d be interesting if they returned and nothing was left but craters.
More on topic, iron dome is an automated missile interception system and works well to protect Israelis from missile attacks. Just because a system is automated doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea, but obviously there’s high risk.
There is a massive difference between guns on automated fire control and an AI aiming missiles.
One could argue that, by making the fire control guaranteed, the border might stop being challenged and deaths thus go down. (Nobody to taunt, either.)
Landmines work by the same principle. Many killed by landmines are children.
> 87% of the casualties were civilians and 47% were children (less than 18 years old).
Not really. Mine fields are not certain death. They don’t always have the opportunity to announce themselves. Guns on automated fire control have the option of announcing themselves prior to engaging. They can also be turned off, something not easy to do with mines.
It’s painful but necessary to note that Hamas have a track record of weaponising children [1]. A child approaching the border is thus not guaranteed safe, and could reasonably be fired upon by a human or a gun on automated fire control. (Not arguing for killing kids. Just that “kids could get killed” isn’t an effective argument against this weapons platform.)
War is terrible. I don’t think automatic guns make it significantly more terrible. (Landmines do.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers...
That makes no sense to me. Children being killed by landmines is an example of a lack of fire control. If the land mine had fire control it could detect enemy soldiers then children wouldn't have to die.
In particular, you don't set up a few thousand roboguns and then leave them there when the conflict is over, which is responsible for most of the civilian deaths you're referring to, including those of children.
Except it's not a border, it's more like a massive concentration camp. Plus, the kill zone is hundreds of meters inwards.
Its time governments around the world invest in quality gamers to help them fight their battles.
I can't help but think, in a war between two nations fighting exclusively with such tech (not too far fetched for my generation or my kids generation), war itself becomes comical and essentially a measure of economic strength. How quickly can you build these robots and how quickly can you deploy them.
Imagine a general shouting orders over a bunch of acne-faced teenagers trying to win a war for his country.
I don't think the problem is with AIs acurrately identifying friends and enemies. You can't solve that 100% anyway, but if it can aid humans and prevent mistakes, all the better. The problem is when you start to build absolutely relentless border drones that can one-shot the enemy, without any possibility for mercy or negotiation.
With weapons, the desired outcome is not to kill, not in most circumstances anyway. In circumstances where it is, it is almost always the desire of an individual wielding a weapon. Normally, the desired outcome is deterrence or defense, and when used proactively, to lessen the enemy's ability to continue to wage the conflict. With deterrence, the threat of death is the deterrent, with defense, killing is the machanism by which the threat is neutralized, and with proactive aggression the goal may or may not include killing, and is more likely to include killing if the enemy's ability to wage conflict is dependent on manpower. In all three scenarios, the desired outcome of developing autonomous military capability is to save lives.
Also, having people in the loop reminds at least someone that this is 'real' and that we need to carry on thinking about it. If you can obliterate enemies' bodies and the only duty on people is to restock the ammo I think that reduces the moral burden of conflict in an unacceptable way.
One maybe stupid example is when there were lots of Syrian refugees on the way through Europe in 2015. We learned the hard way that, if people are pushing against your borders, the only way to keep them out is to eventually use force. We were not willing to do so, so we had to accept that and grant people asylum (which I think was the right decision).
Imagine (a bit scifi but for the sake of argument) "border patrol 2000", which will give a warning, then give a more stern warning, then raise a wall, then try rubber bullets, then try to keep you from climbing the wall with a grappling arm, and finally using live rounds. If you are really determined it will eventually have to shoot. Human solderies did shoot in the past but they did also sometimes not shoot, and it always had a political aftermath. But with automatic systems, it is too easy to psychologically detach, and to say it's e.g. the refugees own fault.
I think you are wrong. most countries do a terrible job of efficiently- or even effectively- defending borders. I'm not making a political statement, but just look how many illegal immigrants get into US, EU, etc. Even Israel, which is relatively small, has to invest vast resources into maintaining their fences. Please note, i don't want to be dragged into a political discussion, i'm simply explaining why i think your are wrong.
That's not inefficient/ineffective, the system is just optimized for different things. It ensures a cheap and compliant labor force for things like agriculture.
If we narrow the discussion to borders that aren’t very peaceful, there aren’t many successful solutions. It looks like “nothing gets through” works, but “only approved traffic gets through” doesn’t work.
Autonomous weapon systems are no different. They raise the deterrence factor so that you are not likely to be attacked by simply having the capability and your adversary knowing that you have the capability.
This is something i've always found weird... Nukes arguably make the world safer by your definition one but particular country gets to decide who is safe and who gets a free conversion to democracy.
Its maddening.
It depends on who has them and how they use them.
Autonomous weapon systems are (theoretically) much more precise and don't leave radioactive destruction in their wake (unless they are nuclear-armed autonomous weapons systems--that's a terrifying thought).
The greater precision and less permanent nature means they are more likely to be used offensively rather than just held in strategic reserve as most nuclear arsenals are.
What makes nukes unique, and MAD work, is the simple observation known to every nation: if one country decides to nuke another, there's nothing anyone can do about this - once the decision is made and the button is pressed, the other country turns into glass. But since nukes fly longer than the time it takes to detect and launch a retaliation strike, no one dares to launch first because they'll get glassed too, and there's also nothing anyone can do about it.
Conventional weapons, autonomous or not, can't unleash destruction at necessary scale and certainty.
There are quite a few countries that have nukes now, and not just half a dozen little ones. For example, India has SSBNs.
Like with a minefield, morally fine when marked, very immoral if not marked.
Without even getting into the other aspects of Hezbollah's occupation of lebanon.
People reading this, feeling confused, and think this is an actual discussion. Please go on and read about the topic on wikipedia.
Is it unthinkable that at least some Palestinians would resort to defending themselves after their homes were stolen and while being under constant threat of extermination?
You’re right that it doesn’t compare. Colonisers have always been far more brutal than any response they received.
nobody fires those rockets for fun, either. the casualty rate among the people doing it (and any civilians who happen to be in the area) is much higher than that of their targets.
It might deter some percentage, but considering how many people gladly accept certain death, an increased chance of death isn't a big hurdle.
I'm just thinking in terms of technology and possible outcomes, from a purely pragmatic point of view. You might have just started reading my post by trying to guess which side I was more likely to be on, and then confirmation bias may have just caused you to interpret the way I said things to validate that guess. (I could easily see someone also coming to the opposite conclusion from that post, for example. But you and they would both be wrong.)
I don't think the language I used was "othering". I just think sometimes some things are talked about from an abstract, realpolitik-esque, mechanistic perspective, and sometimes things are talked about from a human and moral perspective. It's only a problem if you're trying to do the latter and you end up sounding like the former.
However, you do make a valid point. I only brought up the afterlife component, but due to what you say, they may feel cornered, like they have less to lose and are making a last stand of sorts, which might further bolster determination and willingness to risk death. So that's another factor.
It's besides the point of the discussion, but I overwhelmingly support the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestine conflict and agree with your comments on the matter. Of course I sympathize with people struggling in desperation. I don't think it's offensive, or a stereotype, or untrue, to say that many of them are more okay with dying because they believe death isn't permanent and that the afterlife will be a positive experience. I think that's just a fact which carries no value judgment.
Of course, I understand that even if they thought death were permanent, they still may brazenly risk death to fight for their cause, but my point was that the belief that it isn't permanent even further increases that determination to face death.
This is just a thread about AI, not about politics, which is why I made it about AI.
There is a strong movement for banning anti-personnel mines precisely because they are horrific weapons that kill and maim indiscriminately.
The problem with mines is less that they are indiscriminate and more that they outlast their battles.
https://www.un.org/disarmament/anti-personnel-landmines-conv...
Also there are 32 countries that refused - sadly no surprises who that actually is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Ottawa_...
It's going to be difficult for you to find many people who agree with this assertion.
Most people awknowledge the necessity of self defense, and many others who agree with the death or penalty agree with the idea of death as punishment for certain classes of crimes.
Now there's an argument to be made about a judicial process being followed or the issue with unintended consequences/blowback but it's a hard sell to your average person that a brutal dictator shouldn't be killed.
If I were to characterize any part of Korea as a “dystopia”, it wouldn’t be the part that defends itself with robot machine guns. Indeed, the robot machine guns were invented to protect South Korea from falling under the dystopia that has overrun the North.
If you believe what the CIA says about other countries, you’ll believe lots of lies.
Would you rather be in North Korea or South Korea?
NK with destroy them with guided artillery or something similar right before attempting an invasion.
So no, they don't serve that purpose.
In the process, there is story after story of someone losing their entire Google history, being blocked from Google Ads, Mail, etc. all because some automated system kicked in and decided they were a problem. Since Google doesn't have any reasonable appeals process this usually turns into a kafkaesque hell for people who experience it.
Now imagine you put that exact same computer system in control of sniper rifles and drones that can kill someone.
Yeah. It's not an ethical dilemma, it's a hellish reality.
Let's wait until Google (or someone with essentially an unlimited supply of money) can figure out how to make it so that they can run their own services without randomly killing people digitally before we start to kill people in real life with those same tools.
For those that haven't seen it, it's on youtube.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots
And they've been on battlefields for much longer.
My point: you're not going to find many drones like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov in the foreseeable future.
It's also failing to actually realize military objectives. The problem isn't delivering bullets or explosives to the target, it's finding the target in the first place.
Drone surveillance is a much bigger threat than killer drones. You are more likely to be thrown into prison because of drone technology than being killed.
A better comparison would be the Japanese approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
b) This type of weapons exists in many military industries and is bought by many countries (any country that can afford them). Making this specifically "ethical" in connection to Israel is appallingly biased.
Are you saying it is not autonomous just because there is a person in loop? Seems pretty clear that it would be easy to remove that person, making it fully autonomous, unlike a remote controlled device.
I any case, even if there was some 'autonomous' weapon (which is not the case here), what is the point of talking about autonomicity of weapons as though they are not being deployed and launched by humans.
> With such overlapping fields of fire, even heavily armored vehicles would be quickly eliminated. The effect on a human body would be overwhelming, disproportionately violent, and would leave little in the way of human remains.
You can tell this is not written by a person with any military knowledge or with an agenda against weapons.
Non peaceful borders have been manned with such weapons operated by humans for more than a century (in the case of machine guns). And generally, if you can shoot one bullet and kill someone, you don’t use keep shoot hundreds of bullets, and if you can stop a threat with bullets, you don’t launch a rocket at it.
Israel doesn’t launch rockets at people next to the border. And tries to avoid killing unarmed people (for example by aiming for the legs). I assume every sane military does the same. Killing unarmed people, besides obviously being immoral, is bad strategically as well.
(This comment deals with a specific paragraph, and not the actual interesting issue raised by this article, which is not unique to Israel I presume, and is practiced by all military industries capable of building such weapons today)
EDIT: well, I had it coming. I didn’t mean for it to become the classic Israel vs Palestinians flame war - just wanted to point out the realities of borders, wars and weapons which I suspect most HN readers are not exposed to. But again, I should have seen this coming. :(
1. Did a human die? Yes.
2. Was it caused by another human, directly or indirectly? Yes.
3. Did the perpetrator intend for a human to die? Yes.
Yeah, I'd call that murder.
The rest of us will ignore you, however. Personally I think your definition is evil, not just wrong.
(Why? At least because it hurts their cause.)
I respectfully disagree, Israel is an occupation force, has overwhelming power (military, economical and diplomatic) and they do kill grown people and children almost without prejudice. Some official numbers (I suspect it is even worse in reality):
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-208380/
P.S. I don't condone violence on both sides, eternal war like one in Palestine/Israel is horrible (I've lived through 4 years of war, believe me a day of it is too much), but I really don't like political correctness, where we must have "balance" in reporting, but it is completely clear who holds the keys of peace and who has the finger on the trigger)
At no point I’m saying there’s not casualties, including civilian casualties, including horrible mistakes, including trigger happy psychos that make it through the ranks.
But the imbalance of casualties is the result of Israel being better at it.
It would be great if there was peace. But even if I ran Israel and the Palestinian Territories as a dictatorship tomorrow I still wouldn’t be able to turn all violence to zero.
Personally, as an Israeli I would love for Israel to evacuate settlements. But pretending that would bring peace is not even naive, it just doesn’t align with anything anyone involved is saying.
There is no easy solution for that conflict, but killing more people and holding millions of people in de facto concentration camp sure wont help it.
It sounds as if you have an idea that Israel could just make it all go away in a day if they’d like. I would love to know what you think that move would be.
I agree with you that no one can make it go away in a day, and that is a big problem. Every day of the conflict causes more pain, more casualties, and expands vicious circle of violence.
I guess that current generations are lost cause, as long as we always frame it into "us vs them", "we are good, enemy is bad", the conflict will never end.
Maybe the solution is one state, with citizens, not religious groups, maybe it is two states (dunno if that is even possible at this point).
Also, extreme conditions in Gaza and West Bank don't help. Imagine if young people there have an option to go to real university, have a nice job, a house. Would they be willing to blow themselves, killing many innocent people. (Not to say poverty is the primary cause of attacks, but that level of desperation certainly doesn't help)
Don't wish or do anything to other people which you wouldn't want for yourself. Imo, that should be a good start. To change the world one must start from himself.
They do. They are known to go to extreme lengths to avoid harming civilians, including calling up before bombing, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombing ahead of actual bombing etc.
And why are they bombing civilian neighborhoods in the first place: because that's were Hamas puts their rocket lauchers. That is a war crime too, and it is worse, because the only reason they do it is to attract attacks towards civilian areas; tactically those rocket attacks are just dumb - they only serve to get media coverage when Israel find they have had enough of it and flatten it.
Instead they keep doing this stupid inbetween thing that helps nobody but the weapon manufactures, and those who like to hurt humans.
Granted neither of those options could be done in a day, but peace in two years seems about as good a solution as any, no?
So if you were wondering why they do this "stupid inbetween thing" instead, now you know.
It doesn’t sound like Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
- Hamas deliberately launch rockets from densely populated areas and from hospitals. This is a war crime as big as anything Israel has done in recent years.
- Israel goes out of their way to avoid harming civilians: often calling affected areas on phone, dropping leaflets, "firecracker" bombs that go off over rooftops and after that do they bomb the area.
Regarding who hold the keys to peace, and who has their finger on the trigger, I think the government glorifying and paying people who sneak into towns and slaughter sleeping families with knives is a pretty big impediment to peace.
And this somehow mean "almost without prejudice"?
To me it's exactly the opposite - Israel can do what they want, and yet, they aren't. They are barely harming the Palestinians (compare casualty figures to ANY other conflict).
On the other hand Palestinians (mainly Hamas and other groups in Gaza) are attacking as hard as they possibly can.
So why do you think Israel has the key to peace here? Seems to me it's exactly the opposite.
This doesn't make bullets any less lethal. If a bullet damages your femoral artery, you'll bleed out in minutes if not seconds.
It definitely make it less lethal. Your chances of dying from a well aimed bullet to the legs are an order of magnitude less than a well aimed bullet for the head or chest.
In case it’s unclear: Aiming for the legs would be an option for an unarmed person approaching the Israeli Gaza border, and not yielding to instructions, or warning shots. There’s generally not any other good options if your goal is to keep your border protected, and protect your forces against such events being used as diversions for a real attack, which is why it’s a common tactic.
It also remains the only moral option, but of course this assumes you consider other people to be humans - given that members of the Stern gang became impotent members of the Israeli government, I am basically convinced that the Isreali government does not, though some individuals do.
In fact someone in the same boot camp as me got a 7.62 through his thigh after he didn't get the notice and wandered around between the targets as people started shooting. He survived with no lasting injuries. Extremely lucky but still.
Source: I got most of my small arms training on G3s which are 7.62.
I have read many statements similar to this in recent months, but I haven’t come across a good analysis of how offensive drones were used/defended against (if they were) in that conflict. Anyone have a good resource?
You'll also find countless combat footage from the azeri drones destroying Armenian positions. Some are even on YouTube, most on the azeri defense ministry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xme_NTpVauU
Israel been supplying the azeris with drones for a while, and were even accused of "test firing" it on real Armenian troops themselves to impress the azeris into buying them.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-company-charged-l...
This seems like the real threat to me. The ethics of outright autonomous weapons have a straightforward solution, at least in theory: giving the order to deploy them is precisely morally equivalent to pulling the trigger yourself. A flying bullet is a simpler system than an autonomous network of machine guns, but you still set it in motion and are responsible for its path. No, the tricky part is when you can't tell who set it in motion.
Imagine if the military forces of Myanmar had this kind of robots and decided to deploy them during civil protests...
It’s easier to kill civilians and blame it on a bug than to admit that someone ordered the attack.
This article is just anti-Israeli propaganda
I find it disappointing to read how it's being received on HN
---
EDIT: Why is this being down-voted?
Are those drones different from missiles in a meaningful way? No, certainly not in any "ethical" way
Is there a reason to single-out Israel here? No
Explain if you disagree and actually have some knowledge and experience with this international industry.
It is just a matter of fact.
A good thing however is it seems to changing slowly towards a more nuanced perspective.
Here's a true story which kind of describes a very similar situation but with a different outcome than what we've seen (yet).
For years I was bullied at school, and anytime I took revenge teachers arrived swiftly, telling me that even if the others started I wasn't allowed to respond. I still did though but it was obvious that I got more trouble for it than them.
Then I came to a new school. Pattern continues. I complained, nobody did anything.
Then one day I gave another bloke a real beating, and for a change my teacher stepped up and told the other teachers that if they couldn't ensure skinkestek was left alone they better not interfere when I gave the bullies a beating.
That was the last fight. Once they realized they wouldn't get any sympathy anymore it stopped. My siblings also stopped being harassed.
Generally everything got quieter because I was top dog now - and I didn't want to fight.
I feel this is the same in middle east. Israel is strongest but want peace. The international community keeps this conflict going like my teachers used to do by verbally abusing the strong but peaceful one.
My guess is the moment Hamas realizes there is no more sympathy to be gained by doing insane attacks that only serve to anger the neighbor then we'll get peace.
Either you're incredibly naive about what an actual threat to a country and its civilians means (oh no! they invest in Army and weapons), or you're just a little bit anti-semite.
Its ridiculous and pathetic you want to frame this as an attack against jews. I guess you took a page from ultra-islamists calling every criticism of islam "Islamophobia". But that's just you closing your ears and shouting "Blah Blah Blah I don't hear you.. Israel good, Israel good, Israel good", _Every_ Nation State in existence is an organized crime organization with a seat in the UN, Israel is just unlucky enough to have come late to the game, when Universal Human Rights were recognized as a good idea. You don't gain points for pointing out how this country or that killed n millions more than Israel, at least those other mobsters got a claim to the territory they rule that is more solid than "Well there is this book that a sky daddy wrote and it says right there that this piece of land belongs to us".
If so, all the Jews that were chased from their homes in all the neighboring countries should also be given their homes back too, right?
Because this is a lot more complex than the media typically give it credit for.
Media conveniently forget that Jews were also driven from their homes and into Israel - only Israel integrated their refugees instead of putting them in refugee camps for use as a political pawn.
Secondly: Feel free to dig out your sources. It would not be the first time I changed or nuanced my position on a topic were I thought my mind was set in stone.
Here's what needs to be proved for your claim to stand - as currently written:
- Israel (officially by government or military leadership)
- actively (as in: ordered it to happen)
- sends (plural, recent)
- invade Palestinian homes, burn centuries old olive tree fields, block access to water
- bonus points for this: (while conveniently promoting retarded water purification trinkets).
Prove it and I'll add it to my list somewhere near white phosphorus (because I'm fully aware Israelis mostly aren't saints).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/state-funding-settler-institut...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settlement
https://religionandpolitics.org/2017/05/30/how-american-jews...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-olive...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-idUSL...
How old does something needs to be for it to be bullshit. Because the land palestinians have lost is now pretty old too, and their claim is subsequently bullshit. They should just accept that Israel exists, it won various wars, and now owns a lot of land where palestinians used to live.
And regarding the "ownership" Israel has over the land, well... when your 300-million-strong neighbors around you all hate the digestive bacteria in your guts and your army is the same thing as your people, I wouldn't exactly call that a stable or a secure way of living. In fact, that just sounds like a good old apartheid regime to me, not really surprising though given that Israel is just a European colony who powered through decolonization through sheer dumb luck and a powerful nanny/benefactor/ally state.
But when the world have thrown out the jews from their homes in all the neighboring countries and collected them in Israel at the same time Palestinian Arabs were thrown out from their homes in what is today Israel it becomes weird to talk about only one of those events in isolation, don't you think?
Just because Israel integrated their people instead of putting them in camps waiting for the others to be "showeled out into the sea" doesn't mean they are worse?
IIRC (I'm not that into India / Pakistan) this was about the same thing UN tried when they divided India / Pakistan aroubd the same time.
Stay special!
Either this person is naive, as I said (I mean this in a non-offensive way), or this person is fine with this a threat being materialized. In this option B, you can call such blind hatred against a country and its people whatever you prefer.
If you attack the only national home of the Jewish people, the only state that can be relied on to stand up for them, I don't care if you do it because they live in Israel, because they care about Jews or because they are Jews.
The result is the same.
Israel != Judaism.
What does that mean exactly? The Jewish race, or the Jewish religion?
Do American Jews not count because they are not in the majority and/or the race/religion isn't specifically written into law?
In any case, the result is indeed the same: that Israel cannot be criticised.
But people are not criticising Israel because "they care for Jews", but rather for who they don't care for.
TLDR; If You want to defend Israel, or attack its attackers; Do so without ad-homs, straw-men and/or unreasonable maxims.
I am Jewish with lots of family there. However being Jewish does not elevate Israel from criticism.
They were definitely a model country for some time. Now... not so much. Right-wing nationalism has infected every part of the world.
It is said that Al Saladin, upon learning that Richard Lionheart’s horse had died in battle had the best horse in his own stalls sent to his opponent as a gift.
It would appear that Saladin held King Richard in high esteem (he was brutal to those he did not)
Compare that behavior with our drones and F-16 raining death from the safety of miles of distance, and you see how pusillanimous we’ve become. Im sure NPR will wax poetically about drone operator’s PTSD, but it’s not PTSD what they suffer from for there was no trauma. It’s shame, guilt and disgust.
In the Christian West we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war. We sought to emulate him, added his behavior to our codes of chivalry. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that future generations will spit on the memory of our generals loosing wars from the safety of telework.
Given PTSD manifests in people who have never killed and is not restricted to soldiers (e.g. victims of sexual assault and traffic accidents [1]), this claim is unsubstantiated.
> we held Saladin in the highest esteem for the way he conducted himself in war
You’re transporting values from a zero-growth world, where war was practically the only route to advancement, to a positive-growth one. War was honourable when it was necessary. It is no longer necessary. The era of celebrating our enemies has long passed. (That is why everything is now framed in terms of defense.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-traumatic_stress_disord...
I think that sums up ethics well, 'Those who can, do; those who can't, ethic.'
Although Google has shown people employed in the field are also genuinely awful people. How have we got to a stage where the worst humans of society are employed doing ethics?
Here's a loitering munitions meme if you don't know why the Harop is different to missiles - https://twitter.com/MENA_Conflict/status/1371106931109167105...
At least one of the 'autonomous'robo-snipers photos linked is photo-shopped, but here's a very dystopian real photo that at first I thought was a Bansky https://akhbaar24.argaam.com/article/detail/171579 (last photo)
Also the joystick control is kind of LOL. Give her a mouse and keyboard!
Warfare is the failure of all other conflict resolution mechanisms. The goal of warfare is to end the capability of an enemy to continue to wage that war, so as to put them in a position where they have to acquiesce in the disagreement that could not otherwise be resolved. This means targeting strategic military and economic assets of an enemy.
Historically these assets have been human beings. Until very recently, even after the industrial revolution, manpower was the prime driver of an economy. It still is in most places in the world. As production becomes increasingly automated, the targets that will involve more loss of life will be military targets, unless military operations are automated as well. Automating military operations ensures less loss of life.
Automated weapons designed for defense, such as defense of a border or perimeter, are equally as morally defensible as manual defense using lethal force. The morality of the action in both circumstances is predicated on the right of the defender to occupy that territory. If a transgressor is warned that passing a point may end in loss of life and they choose to take the risk anyway, neither scenario is more or less morally defensible. Where do we get this idea that it is morally superior to have a guy do the killing?
If a robot does the killing, it just becomes a figure, and human life is cheapened further.
These kill walls will be deployed more and more and I can guarantee the people being shredded by them won’t be people from Western countries.
I live there (well, "here" for me), and it's already intolerable if you're a Palestinian; for Hebrews/Jews there's a process of gradual decline in democratic freedoms and a slide into religious obscurantism couple with jingoism. Not that this didn't exist before, or that the government had not fostered that before, but it looks like it's gradually "letting loose".
(This is mostly, but not entirely, independent of the governing PM, Netanyahu.)
The idea is the same - war should not be sanitized, because it removes pressure to constrain them.
It's important that the cost of war is visceral to both sides.
It's a very nuanced book, grappling with the moral issues of a single death now to avoid multiple deaths later, and the unintended consequences of these decisions.
Can anyone win a war with a country that has these factories spread out throughout its land. It will be incredibly difficult to win against it.
If these things can be made modular, with AI and control tech being firmware that can be downloaded over the air, and the hardware being manufactured anywhere, it could lead to end of all wars. Why would you want to fight a war with a country when you know you will never win it.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/03/what-would-have-happene...
Basically, this seems like a terrible idea, and will enable futher distancing between crime/action and responsibility.
The reason to dislike these machines is because of the practical problem of making sure they only target bad-guys. That said... their continued development and deployment is essentially inevitable anyway.
I don't think a hypothetical requiring time travel to obtain 20/20 hindsight is a very reasonable basis for discussion here.
I don't like the idea of these devices very much, I see the problem with controlling them. But there's no way to stop them from being created. The required technologies are too pervasive and reproducible.
We think it would. We thought that about knocking off Saddam Hussein, but the resulting power vacuum killed a lot more than he ever did and gave rise to ISIS.
It turns out predicting "if we kill this guy, it's good" can be far more difficult than you're making it out to be. Hell, we don't even know if killing Hitler would've been good; it might've given rise to someone far more competent.
We killed Hitler and it's been a net good because we're still in Germany making sure 80 years later. If we'd planned for something similar in Iraq we might not have fucked it up so badly.
"War is symmetric" is a fallacy. You often can't shoot back at who is shooting at you, but you can shoot at others.
Anyone who eschews development of such military system risks becoming a toy of those who went all in.
The Armenians just lost a lot of territory in Nagorno Karabakh they considered their own - to an enemy who had suicide drones. Their country wasn't exactly big even before that loss.
Fifty other nations in potentially similar position looked at that war and its outcome. I doubt that their decisions were "let us stay moral and possibly be next on the chopping block".
IMHO while it's true their enemy had 'suicide drones' (which are actually loitering munitions, but 'suicide' makes it sound so much more evil) that wasn't a deciding factor - they also had Turkish drones that didn't require self detonation to work.
Azerbaijan put a lot of videos on youtube showing them bombing and pursuing groups of Armenian soldiers with those drones, not the suicide drones. The suicide drones were anti material weapons against mobile air defense and other harder targets.
The azeris even used old (trash) AN-2's turned into drones to get a response from Armenian air defense systems so that loitering munitions like the herop could identity air defense systems with minimal danger.
We are already in this race. Everyone is, even if they won't acknowledge it. Without anti air/anti drone technology no ground force is safe. This isn't new or unique to drones - it's the truth of every war where air dominance occurs.
In the Six Day War Israel destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground in its opening strike, and when Egypt tried to retreat from the Sinai they used their air force to bomb the retreating units with impunity. The remnants of Egypt's air force couldn't fight against an intact air force so they flew support sorties but were overall ineffective. No drones required. It's just gotten cheaper to do.
If the Meanie Republic uses Agony Clouds against the citizens of Goodistan, the rest of the world notices. Maybe the Meanie Republic completely wins and even annexes Goodistan, but the bystander countries are going to take Meanie atrocities into account when deciding how to interact with that state.
Relatedly, a year ago "Why don't we use chemical weapons anymore" was trending on HN (it's a good read): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22661465
So the moral outrage is likely to be absent, at least compared to things like flattening of Rotterdam by Luftwaffe or Rape of Nanking.
The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if your enemy (or your friends, or civilians, or large dogs, or cattle) enter the minefield, they're going to die or at least be mutilated.
Obviously, some of that is disadvantage. The biggest disadvantage is that they're cheap, and buried in the ground, so it's tempting to leave them there, especially if you happen to lose the conflict. So they continue to kill people long after there are no enemies left.
Automated gunbots have the same advantage as landmines. They share a shade of the minor disadvantage, namely they can't reliably tell enemies from friendlies or civilians. But neither can a grunt in a machine gun emplacement.
They are expensive, and above the ground, so there's no world in which civilian children, years after the conflict, are shot to death while playing in a field.
So if these are the "next landmine" I say: good. We would all love to live in the world in which there is no war, but, we don't. Until we do, we will need the weapons of war.
It's still immoral.
In a vacuum, with perfectly spherical frictionless humans, sure.
In the world we live in, a technology which replaces landmines, and kills fewer noncombatants, is an improvement which results in less civilian death. That's moral in my playbook.
It's surprising that wasn't proposed for the US-Mexico border wall.
With enough scapegoating and propaganda, anything is possible.
Lol, I'll take that as a strong 'No'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Certain_Conventi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
A scenario where Palestinians are permanently blinded for approaching the prison fences in Gaza or elsewhere is honestly horrifying.
> It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.