Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
How about the fact that we're doing it, period?
http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...
Once it becomes plausible that any squirrel, mouse, dragon fly, etc. could be an assassination weapon, it will become necessary for heads of state to travel surrounded by swarms of friendly robots, in all sorts of form factors.
But I expect all of us will be surrounded by swarms of friendly robots some day, both to help us with tasks and for security (some kind of artificial immune system?).
As usual with war tech, the research will eventually find its way to consumer products.
Why? If you were a country, would you like to deal with a decentralized/unofficial government that has no control over its citizens?
Travel does not have to mean 'travel outside the country', so even if most attempts to decapitate a country are home-grown that doesn't mean that heads of state don't travel with a security entourage when they are within their own borders.
On top of that I do believe that heads of state already travel with a security entourage when traveling abroad.
It is not necessarily the other nations they're afraid of but their lunatics. And a small robot drone will be within the financial means of anybody with an axe to grind in the fairly near future.
also there's a cult centered around a subconsciousness born in a group sex ritual.
so yeah, good book.
Drones - save our lives. Cruise missiles - save our lives. An A-bomb saved our lives.
Not getting into as many wars would save the most lives. (Note: Some wars - like WW II are I admit unavoidable, but very few fall under this heading)
And if it wasn't for Appeasement, if the western powers made good on their promises (especially the Anglo-Polish military alliance), Hitler could have been defeated before Germans managed to set the whole continent on fire; and if the French didn't put so much trust in the Maginot Line...
And on the Japanese front, it was the economic embargo by the US, as a punitive measure for Japan's attacks on China, that triggered Pearl Harbor. That may actually have been more or less inevitable, the Japanese military had too much influence in their society at that time and were seriously out of touch with reality.
However, I really like the idea. It would be like google street view, only you are the driver -- in the sky.
Besides the risk of idiots crashing their drones in to animals on purpose for kicks you'd have to deal with the effect of animals that are perpetually on the run for these things.
What next? Remote control trophy hunting?
In fact, Internet based, real-life hunting has been done, and is now illegal in the U.S.
At some level I still have a hope that this will stop some day but I fear that it will not and that on my dying day I'll have to revise it once again.
We have a monopoly on the robots now but they are only going to get cheaper in the future and everybody will have them, they will present a threat to all establishments. It is stupid for the USA to be going off on our "might makes right" arrogance destroying all international laws and norms. And for what? Do these dirt poor guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan really pose a threat to us? No they don't.
The only solution in the future will be for everyone to come together to ban these machines, similar to the treaties against land mines and chemical weapons, but the U.S. will have no moral authority to do so.
This future is not very far away.
Why stop at Muslims?
Is there something special about them that they deserve death for harboring feelings that others do too?
But let's not get into politics...
Yes, Obama has been awfully militant lately. He may have thought that it was the best thing he could do in an attempt to get positive approval ratings from the general public. Killing an American citizen w/o trial may have gone too far, even for middle America.
The drone arms race is going to be an economical one. And, given the state of the world economy, no country is going to spend billions of dollars on a drone war anytime soon.
I'm taking a pessimistic view. When the costs of war are externalized (as they are now and will be even more so with drones and robots) we no lose the incentives to not have war.
Fighting war with robots resembles video games. Everyone associates video games with fun. Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it.
One of the reasons why the co-op portion of Portal 2 uses robots as player characters is that the designers knew that these characters would die frequently. In order to keep the E10+ rating and in order to quell any outrage, the designers used robots that are not even vaguely human in shape aside from the fact that they are bipedal. TVtropes calls the effect "Slapstick Sociopathy."
I think you only have to modernize and mechanize warfare to the point that wars are fought and the horrors experienced by a sufficiently small minority of the populace. That is I think if there is some threshold, in America we've already surpassed it and war has become no longer terrible to us; future technological advances aren't required.
There are teenagers today who can only remember living in the america of this abstract war narrative, yet who have lived in a world completely untouched by it: no death, no fear, no butter rations, no wrapping bandages for the troops, no shared purpose, no end in site. Perpetual war is reality, and as this financial crisis seems to be illustrating, is also the priority.
War has certainly touched the U.S. youth as we've seen massive internal shifts on personal liberty (e.g. TSA, security guards in school, signs in public transport that ask you to monitor your fellow citizens). The youth is also clearly able to see that the U.S. spends a disproportionate amount on the military rather than enriching it's own culture and people's lives. Much like the Occupy Wallstreet movement I would expect to see a call, by the upcoming generation, to demand that their birthright is not continued to be sucked dry by the military.
Spike Jonze's short film "Scenes from the suburbs" is an insightful example of how we might imagine a further deepening militarization of the U.S. Sadly it does not seem so far fetched to me.
"Even though home and wife are just a few minutes’ drive down the road from his battle station, the peculiar detachment of drone warfare does not necessarily insulate Martin from his actions. Predator attacks are extraordinarily precise, but the violence of war can never be fully tamed, and the most gripping scenes in the book document Martin’s emotions on the occasions when innocent civilians wander under his crosshairs in the seconds just before his Hellfire missile arrives on target. Allied bomber pilots in World War II killed millions of civilians but rarely had occasion to experience the results on the ground. Drone operators work with far greater accuracy, but the irony of the technology is that its operators can see their accidental victims—two little boys and their shattered bikes, in one especially heartrending case Martin describes—in excruciating detail. Small wonder that studies by the military have shown that UAV operators sometimes end up suffering the same degree of combat stress as other warfighters."
It's from this review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/predato...
of P.W. Singer's recent book.
Personally I'm happy that there is at least some cost to this but I don't think the cost is quite high enough to prevent a runaway use of this horrible technology.
If I were asked to help design/build such a system I would point blank refuse. I'm sure that some other person would step in to fill the vacancy with a smile on their face but I strongly believe that we all have a personal responsibility in what we help create and I don't see any of the users of these systems with the ability to create their own. It takes a lot of tech to launch a missile by remote control from a plane controlled from a large distance with any accuracy.
The people that built this probably sleep just fine but imo they have blood on their hands. And don't give me that 'guns don't kill people' nonsense, if you make weapons for the military you carry your bit.
Collateral damage is such a terrible term.
IMHO the discipline of robotics is facing some of the same agonizing choices that atomic physics faced in the 1930s-1960s. The moral dimension of their work took the physicists largely by surprise. It would be a naive roboticist who did not see the same questions coming this time.
The argument that they're engaging a legitimate military target and not responding indiscriminately makes it pretty hard to call it 'terrorism', although I'm sure they'll be 'unlawful combatants' as long as it benefits those fighting them.
By moving actual soldiers off the front line and having them control proxy weaponry, the force asymmetry is being increased even further. Anyone fighting against it will have no real choice but to strike at those doing the controlling.
There is something seriously wrong with the level of detachment drones afford the actors on any battlefield.
Taking a life should be something done with a large level of reluctance and with the 'taker' risking his own through physical presence. Once that balance is lost it becomes all too easy to resort to violence at a much earlier stage of a conflict.
This is all about reducing the barrier to entry for war and that's a very dangerous thing.
What difference does it make if they used a drone or did it the traditional way?
An attack is an attack it makes no difference how you do it.
The winner of the war gets to do whatever it was they were fighting about, and no real people get killed.
It's a full spectator sport in the book, and the combatants enjoy it too - they have special helpers (will full battlefield immunity by both sides) who collect the recently dead to upload their memory back into the host (i.e. real human).
That's a matter of definition. If a clone is created (assuming for the moment that is possible) with full memory then the clone is a person, and therefore real people.
The fact that in that book they have defined such people as 'not real people' conveniently bypasses the fact that they actually are, they're just not originals.
See Bladerunner.
Also, as long as we're not able to actually do this we are bound to find our examples in fiction rather than in real life. How people think about such issues can be revealing, even if it is mostly theoretical. But you could make a case for dolphins or primates being 'people' without too much effort.
For two, to the people living in that world such clones are temporary copies, and their flesh has little value - but their memories are real. In that world preventing a clone from reuploading memories back to the host is akin to murder. But killing the clone is nothing. (Is memory a person, or is flesh?)
And for three the actual clone does not consider itself a real person, clones created for menial purposes sometimes chose not to upload their boring memories back to the host, but are willing to do their menial work anyway to benefit their host. Since the clone is an extension of the host it's willing to act to benefit the host without benefit to itself, like a cell in a greater organism. Or a bee that will suicide to protect the hive. (What if the clone refuses to help the host?)
Notice how all my arguments are in the context of the book (was the reasoning in the book contorted?), not the real world. It doesn't exist in the real world and the context of how such clones are created and live matters a lot, so I won't want to argue from infinite possibilities.
And finally the entire philosophical part of the plot in the book revolves around "are clones real people", with considerably more detail and nuance than I can possibly list here, but I added a few in parenthesis near each paragraph.
This sort of thing does give more room between shouting and shooting (people) but it won't actually prevent the all-out war unless one side realizes it'd lose and gives in. Otherwise it's just a smoother escalation.
I have no problem with this part. When you're in a war, having the other side doing all the dying is what you're striving for. The decision to go to war is a weighty thing, but once made you don't hold back.
Made weighty in large part by the risk to your soldiers' lives. Drones make the decision a less-weighty one, which is a problem, I think.
I really have no idea though, I can't even pretend to be informed on this.
All this can be done with manned aircraft, it's just a bit more expensive because you have to refuel them every four to six hours and the pilot will eventually be too tired to continue.
The real change isn't automation, but rather the targeting pods that allow you to see what's happening on the ground from miles away at 10,000 feet and precision weapons (like laser-guided bombs and missiles) that allow you to hit exactly what you intend to hit. Whether the aircraft is manned or not manned really doesn't change anything from the perspective of capability. It just changes the cost.
None of this is a substitute for boots on the ground - the conflict in Afghanistan would have over years ago if we could put soldiers in Pakistan. There's just no substitute for having a guy on the ground with a rifle when it comes to enforcing your national will.
In the same way that the space race was an economic proxy of the Cold War, and fairly successfully bankrupted and toppled the USSR.
If you play drone vs drone, eventually someone is going to run out of drones, and the means and funds to build more - they are the de-facto losers.
It'll be nigh-impossible to keep this contained though, when the enemy realises that for a modest loss of their drones, they can take out your C&C bases or level your munition factories.
One of the most recent Culture novels by Iain M Banks -- Surface Detail -- explores in part a similar issue, where two factions agree to settle their differences in a virtual-reality war simulation, but those losing decide to escalate it into the physical realm.
They still need to solve the location sensing issues though - having high-precision calibrated wall mounted sensors aren't really practical for ad-hoc use.
I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy use.
Imagine being a high school kid and having a job targeting drop zones for Amazon packages as drones make their final approaches. It'd be a heck of a lot cooler then driving a brown UPS truck.
Sounded crazy -- "death by robots" -- but that's about where we are (I don't differentiate between remote-operated vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles because it's not germane) We can't and won't torture a guy we pick up with a rocket launcher in his hand getting ready to kill us, but we can push a button and whack somebody who hangs out with really bad people. Don't forget collateral damage. And we call this morality.
Telemetry and robotics are going to change the world in wildly dramatic ways over the next 50 years. Places like HN are where somewhat knowledgeable people can kick around these ideas now, before everybody and his NGO have their own killer robots.
When someone is active on the battlefield, and there's no way to physically capture him, what do you expect?
Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial.
So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and no one bats an eyelash.
The public's distaste for war was not of a moral nature, it was a byproduct of an increasing standard of living. Life was easier, people saw less suffering and death, expected more from life, etc.
As with the space program, America's worship of technology could be leveraged to build super weapons... but only if those weapons led to "hygienic" war in which Americans didn't have to see the horrors firsthand.
So our defense contractors built smart bombs, highly accurate missiles, etc. UAVs are just the next step.
The future holds both precision insect-size (or smaller) attack robots, as well as massive space-based lasers (the death star was uncannily prescient) aimed at earth and able to vaporize nearly anything that isn't heavily armed.
All of this will be controlled by a smaller and smaller class of military personnel. Gone will be the days of recruiting welfare recipients to enlist.
The debacle over "Star Wars" as envisioned by Reagan was mostly b/c the technology wasn't mature enough at the time. But just as George W. Bush jumped at the chance to wage two large wars (b/c the public momentarily would consent) there will come another moment for space based lasers, and we can be sure that our planners will not let that opportunity go to waste.
The recent stories about the drone fleet being pwned, followed by the stories about the Chinese building drones, are designed to get the average person to say "Darn it we need America to be a leader in Drone tech, let's spare no expense to have the very best".
Nowhere in the trajectory toward space based lasers and assassination drones is any moral concern likely to emerge. Why? Because when war is hygienic nobody realizes that it's ugly and worthy of moral reasoning. The discussion becomes about the merits of one technology vs another, one nation's tech vs another, not about what horrific purposes these devices will actually be used for.
So your point is well taken. And it is not lost on our planners. Have you ever wondered why Rumsfeld made such a big deal about saying "Damn it, the US will torture whomever it likes!". Not b/c this was new policy, or b/c he wasn't well aware that his remarks would create a shitstorm. He made the remarks to distract everybody (hawks and human rights activists alike) from what was actually happening. It worked incredibly well. Finally he resigned to leave the impression that he'd been somehow a loose cannon and not a master player in an amazingly well executed propaganda campaign.
Another possibility.. cities protected by phalanxes of model rocket sized guided missiles scanning perpetually for enemy drones.