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Comment by what_is_orcas | Hacker News Reader

I'm really nervous about the future of humanity. I think the trauma of war, especially on the part of the "victors" serves as a necessary negative feedback loop on the general population's support of war (or at least setting a higher threshold for engagement).

This can sort of be seen in response to Vietnam, which was the first major war that the US was involved in with widespread embedded journalism. Journalists were sort of the anti-propaganda of the time.

With the move toward remote-wars, using drones and, eventually, these kinds of robots, we're not getting that trauma, at least not us members of the general public. I'd be really interested in the trauma difference in drone-operators vs. regular-ass soldiers. =

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I am more nervous about the current state of humanity. In 2020, 98.2% of the country voted for political parties which explicitly endorse via congress military occupations of over 80 foreign countries, and nonstop bombing of civilians and children every day for the past two decades. Americans absolutely could not care less about the negative consequences of war already.

Yeah, you're right.

The trauma is actually a bit higher in drone operators from the moral injury aspect. When you teleoperate a drone you cannot say to yourself that you killed to protect your life and that of your buddies.

The part I would worry more about is the selective pressure for violent psychopaths and lack of pressure against them - especially the anonymity. If there was a psychopath soldier who enjoyed say shooting kids for laughs he would at least make himself a high priority target even without any court martial/appalling his fellows enough to let him get killed or doing so directly.

Unless the CIA is involved with the designs there is a small upside that the robot dogs probably wouldn't be capable of rape at least. That isn't an inappropriate joke - it is an honest assessment of their record and moral character.

For the US as a belligerent the biggest demoralizer is that they seldom pick winnable fights and instead pick expensive quagmires for political points. That they fail even with science fiction ubertech demoralizes them further as it makes it cleae the lions lead by donkeys were fortunate in comparison. That seems to serve as progressive national permanent damage to faith. In the case of actually exercising the draft opinions have leaned stronger towards "Immediate treason or defection is the better option over fighting for one who enslaves me." since the Vietnam War.

Of course causus beli fabrication and propaganda to play on fears have also progressed as techniques unfortunately.

> The trauma is actually a bit higher in drone operators from the moral injury aspect. When you teleoperate a drone you cannot say to yourself that you killed to protect your life and that of your buddies.

That's a really interesting insight. I wonder how well "I did it to protect my country" stands in for those other rationalizations (this is to say, how effective is propaganda at mitigating that effect?). I mean, after the drone murdered a bunch of aid-workers & kids recently (but before we knew that's who ended up dead), our media & political figures were out preaching that they were saving our troops and the vulnerable Afghanis with our drone strikes.

> Unless the CIA is involved with the designs there is a small upside that the robot dogs probably wouldn't be capable of rape at least.

Yeah, that's very true and that's something I hadn't considered, and I appreciate that you added it to the context of this conversation. This just seems like a weird way to deal with the fact that soldiers do a lot of wrong when we're all told that they're fighting for what's right.

This one is interesting to me https://www.npr.org/2017/04/24/525413427/for-drone-pilots-wa...

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