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Comment by 5560675260 | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, welcome our murderbot overlords. If we can't stop using drones to kill people, we should at least try to reduce collateral damage. With some advancements autonomous drones could be more precise and reliable than human operated ones, meaning that as an outcome fewer weddings will get blown up.

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But we can stop using drones to kill people, we choose not to. Instead, we see drones as a measure to lower the operational cost of killing people allowing us to kill people simply because they are there.

Some people need killed. Another way to look at this is improving the efficiency and accuracy of that process.

And that's the problem, there is always the Western idea that someone far away must absolutely be killed. And magically, when that person is killed, someone else pops up in their place who needs to be killed even more than the first guy.

If you think that that's a uniquely Western idea, then I have a bridge to sell you.

No one said it's uniquely Western.

If it's not a uniquely Western idea, why write "...there is always the Western idea that..."?

Remember that when the first bus gets blown up by one of these.

It's efficient collateral reducing killing of people who "need to be killed" when it's the West doing it, but uncivilized brutish terrorism when the Other does it.

And if fewer weddings get blown up, we'll use them more and more to kill people. I wonder whether the absolute number of killings will go up or down this way.

Wait, why will we use them more and more to kill people if fewer weddings get blown up? I'm not seeing the causal link.

Because blowing up weddings leads to dissatisfied voters, so politicians are less likely to do that very often.

I think they are suggesting current usage is limited by political fallout due to the misidentification rate.

They hypothesize reducing the misidentification rate will increase the usage rate, ultimately killing more people (but fewer wedding parties)

If they're accurate (or more accurate) then there's less resistance to using them more. They will be used to target an increasingly large number of people (or individuals) with a kind of specificity that present weapon systems cannot be used for and which impedes their use in some cases (because of the risk of collateral damage or the political fallout from a recent incident of bombing a wedding party).

The RAF's Brimstone missile is in big demand for airstrikes because it has much lower collateral damage than the bigger Hellfire and Maverick missiles that allies use. This has actually spurred its use; the number of strikes actually went up.

The pentagon literally have lawyers that designate an acceptable amount of civilian casualties a general can risk to take out a given target. With more precise weaponry theyll be able to get under the threshold much more frequently.

A 90% reduction in collateral damage is useless if the availability of drones means there are 10x the attacks, for example.

> With some advancements autonomous drones could be more precise and reliable than human operated ones

This is speculation at best, outright wrong at worst. Prove they're better than humans before employing them.

One example comes to mind, where an Apache helicopter gunner killed a journalist holding a large camera, thinking the silhouette looked like a rocket launcher.

One soldier made this mistake. What if a faulty image fitting/target classification algorithm deployed in a fleet of autonomous drones was vulnerable to a similar misclassification and started flagging some innocuous objects in people's hands as weapons? Would the rules of engagement be permissive enough for the drones to begin killing those people on their own, would there be human operators in the loop confirming and authorizing the strike?

What are you saying? Our current drone strikes are plentifully precise and smart munitions are abundant.

It’s all a matter of scope. Who is a combatant?

Any failure of the technology will be scoped away. If the drone blows up a city block targeting a kid with an ice cream cone, the cone will be classified as a potential weapon, therefore tragically the child was a militant.

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