U.N. talks adjourn without deal to regulate 'killer robots'
reuters.com
reuters.com
What is the drones annual salary? What is their annual housing cost, base allowance costs, VA medical benefits (lifetime)? How upset will your population be if one is "killed". Get the beancounters involved, and killer drones are going to be very tempting. For $75B per year or so (10% of US military budget) what kind of killer drones could I buy and how many?
The cost to deploy one F35 is astronomical. The training costs and lifetime costs for the pilots alone is heavy. The F-35 dedicates MASSIVE payload to life support for its human occupant. What kind of killer drones can you build with none of that mass, none of the gforce limits? None of the redundancy requirements? Do you need an aircraft carrier (thousands of sailors! -> needs destroyers and a battle group). No?
Can we design these to drop from space? Park 50K in space for quick de-orbit and insertion globally? Can you do this with people these days easily?
Going to be a scary world.
My quick guess is US, China, Russia, EU (maybe), India as places with enough capacity for this type of next gen battlefield? Maybe EU will move too slowly, so it'll be US / China / Russia?
Surely the individual decision-makers are, as with all human beings, averse to a world swarming with killer robots.
That states make indefensible decisions with much greater frequency than their individual statesfolk is so obvious at this point; it's time to simply stop tolerating their existence and move more swiftly into the next stage of information humanity.
I'm a citizen of one of the states you mention and I can assure you: amidst all the disagreement and political polarization, there is complete consensus on not wanting a world dominated by killer robots.
That and nukes. It is ok to not want these things, but to survive as a nation state, these things will become necessary developments in order to survive. If GP is correct about some of the capabilities we're likely to see, then any nation state without these will need to begin development in order to ensure survival. Is that an arms race waiting to happen? Yes. Is there a better way? No. The alternative to an escalating arms race is actual war.
We will never be done with power hungry ideologues, we will never be done with Communists whose sole mission is dominion over the whole world, we will never be done with petty despots (looking at you, Putin) who so wish they could play a meaningful role on the world stage. All of these have every reason to develop a new super weapon to tilt the balance of power in their favor.
Iran, for example, has started its centrifuges again. They also have some new ones that spin at 10x the speed of their old ones. They are very close to possessing a nuclear bomb. Up until the end of the Trump presidency they had halted production of uranium and talks were going well. Biden has about the weakest foreign policy of any president in the last half century.
Part of that effective foreign policy is the military might the US has. (Why do we have 5 carrier battle groups? Why does Britain only have one? Why does Russia have a single carrier that's in rather poor repair?)
If killer drones are an effective war-fighting tool (an it appears they are), they are inevitable. What we need to ensure is that they are used as humanely as possible.
Yeah, good point. But I can absolutely envision - without much difficulty - a megatons-to-megawatts motion swiftly bringing an end to this period in Earth's history.
And more generally: maintenance of arsenals of weapons of mass destruction is _very_ costly. Economics of energy production and storage are perhaps a viable mechanism to add pressure in favor of disarmament.
> (Why do we have 5 carrier battle groups? Why does Britain only have one? Why does Russia have a single carrier that's in rather poor repair?)
We can also summarize questions of stagnant geopolitical asymmetry this way:
How long will the internet abide states as nodes of economic and social standing?
Trying to shoehorn a previous world order into an information age society seems like a colossal waste of time in service of nostalgia.
Nostalgia does not guarantee me personal autonomy. Neither does it guarantee me a right to self defense. Nor does it guarantee a free practice of religion, free press, or a right of association.
Ensuring the survival of a nation state that adheres to the US Constitution will guarantee those things.
> How long will the internet abide states as nodes of economic and social standing?
Take a look at China and their authoritarian take on "the internet". "The internet", that is the masses that make it up, do what they're told, consume what they are allowed to consume, demonize those they are told they should demonize. Goebbels would be jealous of the machine the modern world has developed.
> Ensuring the survival of a nation state that adheres to the US Constitution will guarantee those things.
This is _precisely_ the uncultured nostalgia I'm suggesting is unworthy of our defenses.
I absolutely support your right to bear arms in your defense. To be free in your religious exercise and associations and speech and press, and in the security of your effects against intrusion.
But the US is not, as you say, a nation state that adheres to the US Constitution in any broad and universal sense.
We have two million people living in cages. Five million more living under supervision of a system of slavery rebranded as carceral rehabilitation. Drugs and medicines and sacraments subject to capricious regulation at best, and often outright prohibition. Fiat currency. Arms which are practical as tools of self-defense unavailable to a quarter of the population.
And I'm not sure that anybody other than (some) white men have _ever_ had these things securely in their civic possession.
So the question is: _can_ a state be the bearer of insurance for these things? Especially now? Why can't we protect each other? Engage in commerce regulated (which is to say, made regular) by the internet alone? I have no idea what the benefits are of the continued existence of the US State, but the downsides are absolutely evident and very real on a daily basis.
> Take a look at China and their authoritarian take on "the internet".
I take your point, absolutely. But doesn't China and the Great Firewall also provide us with an example of failure of authoritarian tendencies as they apply to the internet?
May 35th lives on largely as an internet meme. The official truth may dominate in circles where it can be violently maintained, but those shrink in the face of connectivity, no?
> _can_ a state be the bearer of insurance for these things?
Yes, but it requires the governors of the state to be moral. The peoples of the US have completely failed in passing moral ideologies to their children and grand-children. This moral failure has led to every disintegration of orderly running in the bureaucracy of the US and its states. If the pieces (the people) are immoral, so is the machine.
> And I'm not sure that anybody other than (some) white men have _ever_ had these things securely in their civic possession.
We pretend the opportunity is still to be had. But taxes and inflation steal most of the commoner's earnings. Taxes and inflation see to it that wealth (not necessarily dollars) flows to the elite class. Regulations ensure no one can fight the loss of wealth.
Policy change-politik-is a function of political will and political efficacy.
the internet is just an information conduit, end of day
I can't figure out if you're talking about a nuclear war changing the world, or a nuclear disarmament process that somehow also leads to energy production.
My apologies - the latter.
So while the internet certainly enables us to be more connected as a species, it doesn't eliminate what makes having nations a valuable construct for human societies. As long as our physical environment matters, nations or similar constructs will be around.
Yes, exactly.
> If killer drones are an effective war-fighting tool (an it appears they are), they are inevitable.
I have come to the same conclusion.
It wasn't the USSR that dropped two nuclear bombs (one uranium, one plutonium) on Japanese civilian targets when the Japanese were willing to surrender on the sole condition that they keep their emperor (a religious figure)
In the name of "stopping the spread of communism" the US overthrew popularly-elected governments, sent death squads into Latin America, and killed millions of civilians besides the ones they permanently maimed. This is besides the typical "make their economy scream" that kills civilians as well, in a way harder to quantify. Cuba is still the victim of this decades after the failed Bay of Pigs.
We have technically been in a state of emergency since the 50s with the undeclared Korean War, and for what? The permanent wartime economy hasn't benefited anyone besides the military-industrial complex. American imperial designs in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Yemen, Syria, etc. were all enabled by this escalation mentality and the crimes against humanity that were committed there are a permanent stain on humanity
Heh, that's quite the narrative.
Indeed, what would happen is that if such a treaty was signed, some other countries would develop them anyway, as hidden modes for the use of their otherwise non-autonmous UAVs and UGVs. So any such treaty would essentially be handing the world to countries that cheat -- which would likely include Russia and China.
I don't want my state to produce killer robots. Even if other states do. I can only impact my own. It's no secret that the US disproportionately engages in this "warfare" (read: asymmetrical slaughter) and even under a "liberal" head of state (Obama) civilian casualties of our drone program was 90%.
You're also assuming regulating killer robots means a ban, when the international community could restrict deployments or justifiable uses. It's much more realistic even if rogue drones are created.
The decision makers are duly elected representatives of their constituent body and it is beyond time they acted like it. Otherwise we're going to keep having more Vietnams, more Afghanistans, more pointless civilian death.
If the world's great military powers publicly swear off "killer drones" (let's assume we can meaningfully define such a thing), then they will continue to develop them in secret, but they won't use them in every little border skirmish: every Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or Crimea. They'll keep them for the big game.
This has two good effects (assuming further development of killer drones is bad). Firstly, those of us unfortunate enough to be caught up in the horrendous bloody conflicts I callously described as "border skirmishes" won't additionally suffer from killer drone attacks. Secondly, development of the drones and the military doctrine surrounding them will be stymied: you can do a lot in the lab but any technology develops so much faster with the feedback loop that comes from using it in anger.
Moreover, if there's a big war we're all screwed anyway. If that's your focus, you need to argue that drone availablity makes a big war more likely I'm not convinced that it does - making war cheap makes small war more likely, but all the decision makers know the cost of a big war.
Edit: compare to anti-personnel landmines, or chemical weapons. Both of those see less use because of weapons bans. You might say no, they see less use because the great military powers no longer need them - but you're missing a step. The great powers no longer need them, they decry them as inhumane, they sign bans, and then (almost) everyone stops using them.
See for example Bret Devereux: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
I'm well aware there are many different ways besides the above one could argue it, but my key point is that automatons change the moral calculus, no matter what other premises you accept.
Drones have the power to make WWI look like a football match. They could already be in larger use than people realize, it isn't like one would hear about it. There would be nothing to report.
The history of the use of land and sea mines in warfare suggests to me that this is not a universal we can assume.
If what people "want" is a nice sounding sentence slapped on a roiling pile of inconsistent sub-wants, then good things aren't going to happen.
Sure, nobody wants "a world dominated by killer robots".
Nobody wants "90% civilian casualties" from those killer robots either.
But if people are asked "would you rather Bob down the street get killed fighting in X or let a drone take the risks", what are they going to say? Yes, screw Bob? And that's assuming that the person asked isn't going to be drafted because there are enough volunteers.
If people are asked, "would you rather use drones and kill civilians, or use other methods and kill many more civilians", what are they going to say? Yes, more is better?
Remember this? https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB126102247889095011
The dreaded "arms race" doing its thing since the dawn of humanity.
> If you are a major power with the capability to make 100K+ killer drones
"The major power" is the people that make up the country, which largely don't support this stuff, but there's a handful of decision-makers that can push for this even when the people don't want it. I feel like it's helpful to focus on how it is individual people making these decisions that are going to harm others - not just a result of a country having a certain amount of power/capability. Any one of those people could go public and say that they're not going to let their country go down that path and that they'll discourage others from doing it, but they choose not to for fear of the results.
The populations of most countries probably don't want to attack foreign countries, but they absolutely do want to avoid being attacked by foreign countries, and if having scary weapons will do this, most will be for them.
What does a "smart" killer robot do, without remote connection, in an unexpected situation? And wars are full of those.
And massive jamming (and hacking attempts as well as sensor confusion) is to be expected. So you either have armies that stop fighting regulary out of savety protocols (how likely is that in a war?). Or they do not stop fighting and make AI decisions on who to kill.
As far as I am aware, every side knows this and every side is very uncomfortable with this. But it seems every side feels pushed to advance.
And sure, humans make errors, too. But autonomous robots have a tendency to work most of the time - and then unexpectedly make a exponentionally mess.
That's why most robots who can do damage, work in very constraint settings.
But even harmless roombas did make a mess, by swiping dog poo all over the house, while "thinking" it is cleaning.
Swarms of killer bots out of control .. is a scenario no one wants. And military is about control, they do not like things they feel they cannot control. So there will be caution. Hopefully it is enough, to not trigger bigger, potentially nuclear mess.
Possibly kill anything that looks like an enemy, then attempt to return to base or self-destruct.
I expect killer robots will be programmed with geographic areas within which they are allowed to kill things.
What about sensor jamming or confusing? How to make sure, it is in the right "kill" area?
And if you designate a zone as free to kill everything, you might as well nuke the area.
This will no doubt happen.
> How to make sure, it is in the right "kill" area?
If a robot knows where it started from it can use dead reckoning to know roughly where it is. It can also use landmarks it identifies, or celestial navigation.
All of these should give it a reasonably accurate idea of its whereabouts.
> And if you designate a zone as free to kill everything, you might as well nuke the area.
No, because a lot of UGVs will be used as area denial weapons, i.e. as a smart minefield. They might typically stay where they are and monitor than no-one uses the area. Nukes can't do that.
Smart as in kills anything that moves, sure.
"All of these should give it a reasonably accurate idea of its whereabouts."
But if you add high speeds and bad weather to the scenario, together with highly populated areas, reasonable accurate becomes a relative thing.
Unless the drones as a consequence mostly fight themself in remote areas.
Might be better than humans fighting in urban areas, but reality most likely will be robots vs. bad equipped humans in urban areas.
Hopefully we'll have a chance to recover from the new horrors we are creating too.
Whether you have the capability to make them or not, either the US, Russia, both, or someone else will be HAPPY to sell you a bunch. Which is another reason those with the capability to make them want to keep it, to make the money, maybe even a more significant reason. And countries that _don't_ have the resources to pay for F-35s or air craft carrieres have possibly more to 'gain' here. Killer robots will be a great equalizer in the ability to create a nightmare hellscape, making it accessible on a much cheaper budget.
I imagine most people here have already seen the Slaughterbots video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
A more conventional type of attack would be using large numbers cheap cruise missiles. If you can make them for $20k each then $1bn would buy you 50,000 of them, which is probably a good deal more than the number of anti-aircraft missiles your adversary has, and certainly a lot more than their number of fighter aircraft. Therefore firing off a lot in one go would overload their defences and many would get through. If aimed at infrastructure target, they could cripple a country's economy, and how soon after that do people start starving?
Eh, the rest of the world would probably gang up on you at that point, it'd be pretty suicidal.
I think a more likely scenario is killer robots are making the places that state and non-state actors already "get away" with turning into nightmares just that much more nightmarish, and that many more of them. Whether it's the USA in Afghanistan or what goes on in Sudan or Somalia. More and more places like that, which will be more and more nightmarish. Would the USA even have to "give up" on Afghanistan with that tech doing what the drones alone couldn't? But now also the smaller-budget actors like Somalian warlords get their go at it. It's gonna be great.
Additionally, hypothetical slaughterbots would have much lower civilian casualties.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-you-shouldnt-fear-slaughterbot...
Also, usually chicken-wire fences just go around what's being protected, not necessarily over it (except for small farm animal enclosures, like actual chicken coops). It's hard for me to imagine entire buildings / neighborhoods / cities with chicken wire covering over the tops of the buildings in a way that couldn't be quickly breached with explosives.
Or drones could unroll detcord in a circle against the fence as well.
They were banned because nobody liked them and they weren't tactically useful.
If they were useful they wouldn't have been "banned".
Yeah. Kind of. Officially. In primary school books. Chemical weapons (and biological weapons) don't work¹, in addition to producing horrific images and stories.
It was easy to ban them for this combination of reasons.
Killer robots? We don't know yet, but they have the potential of working excellently well. (Although it depends on various reliabilities, the logistics chain required, activation time, percent deployable time, and failure modes. Probably among other things.)
If they work, it will be hard to get them banned. The measure of their effectiveness will be their ability to neutralise the enemy's military capability without destroying economic infrastructure (which you will want to take over and use for yourself. If you don't, there are nuclear weapons for that).
1. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Turkey has already developed their own autonomous killer drones (which have in fact killed people, in Libya). So any country with their GDP and level of technology probably could too.
According to Wikipedia, Turkey has the 20th largest economy, and 72nd by per capita GDP. So a lot of countries could develop this technology if they wanted to.
this is about making autonomous decisions in the field beyond just local navigation and such. Your arguments hold for non-autonomous drones and autonomous ones to pretty much equal degree. But you don't make any point about why humans shouldn't remain in control of combat decisions.
Landmines and huge minefields. This is death with no human involvement. If a commander draws a box on a map and says deny the ability of the enemy to cross this box on our flank, does he care particularly whether it's mines (that are a pain to deal with after things quiet down) or if it's killer autonomous drones?
Plant security?
Border patrol?
Think of a rich guy with a private island. Security is wildly expensive, but they are paranoid (check out the security some of the Russian oligarchs run - it's pretty much a mini mercenary force). Would they deploy some automated AI that kills anyone unauthorized (after some warnings?) My guess is yes.
Like the Geneva Convention, any robot agreement will be ignored by all combatants as soon as it serves their purposes. War cannot be regulated by gentlemen's agreement.
It may not be a gentlemen's agreement, but it's something with which I imagine there are broad consensus across borders.
The USA state will fall eventually. Will it be in 500 years? 100? 20? Nobody knows for sure. But the fall will cause the end (or even substantial disruption) of a tiny portion of the lives of the people living in the regime's claimed territory.
I don't fault your logic; I just think it's out-of-date. The world (especially those parts of it we're discussing here) is really quite different than in the 19th century. Very little of the original impetus for the state (specifically, solving problems of coordination created by the absence of established communications across the land-mass, as a non-trivial portion of The Federalist Papers seek to resolve) remains.
In other words; we'll be fine. We won't merely survive.
So we avert drone war and consume our way off the environment cliff? Or die before but leave the sludge for the future?
I mean, front row seats to heterogeneous droid swarm mayhem sounds fun.
An “I love my job, disposable consumerism, to prop up other peoples grandparents imagined value to society when many in my family got fucked” is not really helping the “but my American civic life story!” crowd. When it was decided in the 80s business taxes were too high, so sad. So is your so called net worth.
Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson; the dead do not rule the living.
Madisonian philosophy is that we do.
But Jefferson saw servicing generational story of debt as the whole problem in human history.
Adam Smith also agreed; he wrote the powers that be would need insure equality of condition to avoid manipulation of a free labor market (the only market he wrote of).
Somehow we just get Madisonian policy and tall tails of success in a gender and race biased recent history.
If the US wants respect and drone weapons it’s culture should have to prove it’s as capable of behaving responsibly as any other.
Wars generally have a deleterious effect to the life expectancy of the civilian population, even more so in the modern era of mechanized warfare where attacking civilian targets at scale is both practical and practiced (usually not by countries that respect the Geneva conventions, but (a) one cannot guarantee that their opponent will be one of those countries and (b) even those countries have been known to set aside parts of those conventions when they perceive either existential threat or expedience).
No, I don't find it likely at all that most people I know live through a hot war on home soil.
Or nuclear non-proliferation?
Certainly have not been entirely succesful, but I wouldn't want to get rid of them.
As with chemical weapons, they'll still exist, and they'll still be used. But getting the most powerful nations to agree that they are unacceptable and their use has consequences in the international community matters for whether they quickly become pervasive. Vs. allowing the US and Russian defense industries to be in a race to equip the entire world with them as quickly as possible.
From a realist frame, I don’t think there will be a deal. Narrow national interests are too divergent w/r/t/ capabilities, intentions, and alternatives. Furthermore, verifibility and consequent trust is weak.
Pragmatically it's a lack of higher (multilateral) enforcement why these power plays persist.
Multilateral enforcement becomes yet another tool to take advantage of others that aren't invited.
These are war machines. “Dangerous” per se cannot be a disqualifier.
Automated Safety Enforcement Drones are selective and only issue quick justice to the baddies who stand in the way of freedom! If you can't shame leaders based on their prior agreements civil society doesn't have much else to do.
Really, think about what happens when these tools of warfare return home for civilian use, because if they can, they will.
I guess I’d want to see evidence for this before pursuing an international moratorium everyone will undoubtedly violate the second it’s signed. Remote fire doesn’t seem that much closer than remote kill authorisations.
For example, let's say there is a bomb that can be strapped to a drone with a camera on it and guided by AI. That would be easy to evade by just staying out of the open. I'd be much more afraid of my entire city being killed by chemical weapons.
Facial recognition technology will not be a huge game-changer. Most weapons don't even bother to recognize your face to determine if you're a friend or a foe, they just kill you.
Real world autonomous weapons have existed for a long time. The phalanx CIWS is an example of an autonomous weapon designed in the late 60s and it is far from perfect. They tend to just start randomly spraying bullets when they get confused, and they have been involved in friendly fire incidents.
Yes, there is: They don't require human operators, which are a limited ressource. You can only operate so many drones at the same time until you run out of weapon operators / "pilots".
You can't scale human operated weapons in the same way you can autonomous ones, can you? There is nothing stopping you from using hundreds of thousands of cheap, autonomous kamikaze drones at the same time, 24 / 7, if you have the money for it.
> That would be easy to evade by just staying out of the open.
How long can you stay in one building? How long could a drone (or two, with one recharging while the other is flying) circle above it?
Bombing a whole city with chemical weapons, killing countless civilians would cause a major international incident, even with countries not involved in the war / conflict. Killing single individuals with "killer drones" based on AI facial recognition will probably not :/
Sure you can. That's what the whole point of an army is. Instead of just having just one tank, have 500 tanks. Sure, scaling does require more manpower, but that's true even with autonomous weapons until someone invents AGI.
> How long can you stay in one building? How long could a drone (or two, with one recharging while the other is flying) circle above it?
Just put a ski mask on. Problem solved. There is just no way that drone swarms with facial recognition technology are ever going to be viable.
For me it's not so much about what they can/cannot do, but what they will/will not do.
If not, the first casualty of the next war in the Middle East will be the closest Department of Algebra, because the name sounds Arabic.
I wish I was joking. The potential for bad decisions in such autonomous systems is tremendous.
"US Defence Secretary William Cohen has confirmed that an out-of-date map was used in the attack which destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade."
If AI is integral to killer drones, then expect a lot more skirmishes going forward to gather data. And realistically there's only a handful of countries / powerblocks who has the impunity to conduct such "research". And when you narrow perquisites down account for synergy with domestic AI industry, that elite club dwindles even smaller. US, PRC, EU if she gets her shit together.
But IMO killer robots along with developments like prompt global strike will trigger dreadnaught tier shift in resetting global power dynamic. Arms race dilemma 101, countries that can, simply can't afford not to pursue them.
Every nation on earth has the capability.
> to maturity
i.e. hightech platforms designed to confront other hightech platforms. Only a handful of country has both the industrial base in terms of AI and MIC to develop drones for capabilities like Anti-air, anti-sub warfare. Most of the world do not have 5th gen planes or modern subs to even train against. Or the host of communication infra, especially space that's needed to get platforms working in field. Only a handful of countries can even contemplate doing that.
It started with icbm's in the 1950s. More sophisticated platforms like the US the US tamohawk missile have been around since the 80s.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00127t9
It’s really up to date to as he is also delivering a message to those at the UN talks today
The problem with autonomous weapon platforms (probably swarms) is that it looks like they're very powerful weapons that give their users advantages over existing capabilities. Enforcing a ban on them will be like enforcing a ban on gunpowder with swords and castles.
Which really would have been a good idea. It isn't that all those Europeans had to die to get this current stable state.
Of course, there are grey areas here - certainly there are existing missiles that can be launched without a defined target and programmed to aim for anything that, say, has radar emissions that match known enemy systems.
Drones are the new paradigm of warfare which allows smaller players to play in many situations (like the modern limited local wars) on par with the big ones without attempting to acquire nuclear. No UN talks can prevent those smaller players from development of such capabilities.
My point is that we adapt. It's not worse than chemical weapons and it's preferable to bombing entire cities to achieve your objective. Is it finally dawning on HN that war is hell?
I think the objective should be preventing war and that means making it more difficult to kill not less.
I agree and that's usually the connotation behind the words, "war is hell." Unfortunately, either the entire world agrees to never weaponize drones or we all need to start thinking about weaponizing drones. That's how arms races work.
If wars are going to happen though I think we are better off with drones rather than annihilating entire cities, civilians and soldiers together. It's important to elect leaders who are not cavalier about deploying drones needlessly.
It seems entirely inevitable that these machines will be everywhere policing the masses for the powerful few.
Even if a war between great powers were to occur in such a scenario (which would not be in the interests of the elites who profit from the status quo), I don't think killer robot swarms are any more likely to, or capable of, causing global civilization collapse than nuclear weapons already are.
Robots that are solar powered and off in remote parts of the world may continue to destroy people when their nation-state owners are gone because of the last MAD command they get.
A CAPTOR mine sits underwater listening to nearby ships or submarines, for weeks to months. If it hears the right sort of ship, it can launch itself autonomously, track it and kill it, without a human in the loop. It's been in service since the 70s.
No shit... people with power will keep a door available for this technology as a tool to use on dissidents.
Fortunately, despite the Deepminds and such, outside limited games we humans still have the upper hand. And us techies, with some effort, can not only defeat killer robots, but we can adversely affect or even control them.
Considering the many woes of humanity, and the inevitable doom we face, I find this an interesting endgame to play. At least now we have something interesting to do while the world burns.