The Ethics of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers

Agreed. I generalized, but you are entirely correct.

You can't beat the speed of light, or the time it takes nerve impulses to fire Especially once we see armed robots facing other robots, the people will quickly be shuffled out of the mix.

Having said that, my bet is that telepresence still rules to some degree. What you'll see is more strategic control. Just like with HFT, the tactical stuff will simply happen too quickly for meat bags.

It'll be interesting if we start seeing a "war of missiles" for land forces like we've seen play out in the skies. Ground-to-ground anti-robotic ordinance shouldn't be too difficult to produce. It would have a much different signature than other forms of ordinance. If the pattern holds, this would lead to stealth robots, which would be a very interesting development. Hoards of invisible, lethal, ground-based intelligent robots is a pretty freaking scary scenario.

Right now, most drones are fighting non-robotic targets, and doing it with an emphasis on stealth (for example, flying so high that forces on the ground can't see or hear them). This makes latency less of a factor, since the human operators can take their time in selecting targets, and are fairly confident that they won't face any sudden attacks.

As drone-on-drone combat becomes more common, you're definitely correct that more decisions will be made by the drones, without human intervention. I can imagine drones having a bedrock set of commands that don't require human approval (such as, "if another aircraft is shooting at you, drop what you're doing and shoot back"). Humans would still provide overall goals, such as "blow up that bunker", but the drones will have increasing autonomy in how that is carried out.

There's an interesting parallel to the Mars rovers here, precisely because of the massive latency, even though Mars isn't an actively hostile environment. I don't recall the source, but I remember reading about Curiosity having much more autonomy than previous versions. It's given the same bedrock set of commands ("don't drive off cliffs", "don't smash into large rocks", etc), and human operators give it a similar set of high-level goals ("drive towards that weird outcropping over there"). This lets it explore much more efficiently than driving a few feet, waiting on an Mars-Earth-Mars round-trip for instructions, and so on.

"they can react faster than a human sitting behind a computer separated by a further thousand miles away"

Maybe. The problem is identifying friend and foes. An AI might need more time than an actual person. Beyond that, losing a robot is not a big deal compared to losing a person, so the mistakes made in the field (ex. killing an innocent person who happened to get in the way) can be lessened because the fear of death is no longer there for the soldier.

The point of war these days isn't to kill the enemy, but to convince them to surrender and join your side. Faster combat reactions might kill enemy soldiers faster, but if that were the goal you would just drop bombs on them.

You get people to surrender by being reasonable and helpful until they shoot at you, and then fighting back fairly following the rules of war. You have to make being a soldier in your army seem like a better life than being a soldier in their army. Telepresence and combat AI have some value, but will not achieve the main goals.

I don't disagree, but I think you're having some other conversation about eyeballs on the ground versus more and more expensive weapon systems. As a former marine, this is an argument in which I'm very much inclined to agree with you. God knows we don't need many more B-2 bombers to fight the Taliban.

Having said that, the point here is that massive, inexpensive, intelligent, and mobile systems will work alongside troops on the ground more and more as warfighting evolves. This will happen much the same as the dog, horse, or mule worked alongside fighters, only the robotic versions will continue to increase in functionality.

But in the end that's a process discussion -- how will things advance over time. My point was that just like in all other fields, our helpers will soon become our betters. Won't happen for decades yet, but you can be sure it's coming sooner or later. And at that point, just like every other human endeavor, some pimply-faced kid in a Starbucks can control just as much firepower as a four-star general. It will just be a matter of credentials and security.

Sort of agree. Improving the quality of soldiers is about the worst way to go about making the world a better place. It's like the ambulance and the bottom of the cliff, but worse.

Well, Dick Cheney, along with a large number of other people, does not have a heartbeat anymore. He was implanted a continuous pump.

I think regime changes will be done from the inside more often than not in the future - it's been proven to be more effective (and cheaper) than sending thousands of soldiers and machinery to foreign lands...

Meanwhile, telepresent groups of drones and semi-autonomous turrets would be used to fight any localized resistance and protect important objects.

I think (and hope) we won't see any major conflicts like WW1 and WW2 in the future, since there's really no good reason for one (even Europe finally gets it, hence the EU), unless it's an alien invasion...

If the occupied society is too willing to destroy the guard robots, but would not hurt humans, why not give them both? Post a sign on each bot: "WARNING: if this guard is tampered with, its controlling human will be subject to electroshock." Or wire it up so if one bot is damaged it commands a nearby one to retaliate, either against the original aggressor or a random target.

> the man who had a blade replacement for a leg

Oscar Pistorius. He's a multiple gold medal winning Olympic athlete. He has two blades. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius)