Soon, Drones May Be Able to Make Lethal Decisions on Their Own
nationaljournal.com
nationaljournal.com
Game over, half the population on the east or west coast becomes extremely ill or develop cancers, food and water sources permanently tainted.
Instead of making drones we should be making drone detection and capture systems.
That's what leads me to believe this is plausible.
No, they aren't. What's your source claiming this? Why do you say depleted uranium is "badly named"? And if you took some of this dust and spread it on "the east coast" or "the west coast", wouldn't that dilute the concentration by more than a factor of a million and turn an already speculative and unproven risk into a truly truly insignificant risk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Studies_indic...
Because that is pretty much a showstopper as they are wild right-wing nuts.
Okay now you are using wikipedia. Read the rest of the page and realize that only the US, UK and Israel say the DU is okay, the rest of the UN says not. I wonder who has DU ammunition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Chemical_toxi...
It's a shame US tank designers also use DU tank armor to protect soldiers. They're actually killing them with the radiation!
But the fear?
That would be very effective. A terror weapon in multiple senses of the word.
Should those drone detection and capture systems be controlled by humans or algorithms? Just because you remove the word "drone" doesn't make algorithmic warfare any less inevitable.
That said, that is perhaps the silliest way of using drones if one meant business.
― Albert Einstein
ie. We are peaceful, they are not, so we must not rest lest they destroy us while we sleep, and we must destroy them while they are.
There's not going to be some big red switch that is flipped and suddenly the machines decide what to shoot at. Instead there will just be a gradual extension of fire control mechanisms.
And they have an appalling track record for making the wrong decision, because those simple heuristics also tend to produce answers like "Kill this five-year-old child because they're playing in a field where a war took place twenty years ago".
If you're trying to make an argument for why automated killing machines are a bad idea, landmines are just about the perfect example.
The best way to use drones is to think of them as the appendages or hands of one robotic brain instead of individual units. The beauty of networked robots is that they are ultimately coordinated, one knows what all the others know at all times. This is the absolute dream of military commanders. They would adopt the idea much more readily if it didn't put them out of a job. The only reason we can hang on the nostalgia of men at war is because the US hasn't faced a serious military threat in a very long time. Eventually this will no longer be the case and drone on drone combat will be the only reasonable option.
One objection that people have is that drones will eliminate the human cost of war and make destructive combat more common. I say that frequent combat is just fine as long as humans aren't involved. In the future opposing sides will resolve conflicts by destroying a few hundred million dollars of equipment instead of destroying human lives. I'm hoping that total war will be phased out as machines become powerful enough to dominate the battlefield.
On the contrary. They follow orders faster than humans. They don't think at all, in the sense that a human can with their adaptability and ethical awareness and ability to make a judgement call that a situation is not something the predetermined rules were designed to handle.
This is the main reason I don't see LARs becoming widely used. They are superior to human warriors in the kind of war that is decided by split-second reactions, when you know exactly who the enemy is and you're otherwise roughly evenly matched. Very few modern wars are actually like that.
The beauty of networked robots is that they are ultimately coordinated, one knows what all the others know at all times. This is the absolute dream of military commanders.
But that dream becomes a nightmare if the system is ever compromised. Of course, no battlefield-wide, 100% computer-driven, 100% remote-controlled system would ever be deployed with a security vulnerability, for the same reasons that no military equipment ever fails under combat conditions, no military unit in the field ever finds itself unable to communicate with its commanders, no computer virus has ever found its way into a secure installation, no software bug has ever caused military equipment to fail, and no human involved in the military or intelligence communities or their suppliers has ever been disloyal.
One objection that people have is that drones will eliminate the human cost of war and make destructive combat more common.
What is the point of having these machines, if they will not ultimately result in a human cost? Weapons of war are made for one purpose, and one purpose only: to be able to kill people. Any more desirable outcomes, like taking control of a hostile country without actually killing everyone, tend to be predicated on the threat that you can do so if you need to.
Also, I can think of uses for temporarily incapacitating people. The US government sends in an airstrike along a corridor covered by airbases. However, when the opposing air forces try to scramble their jets, their pilots are incapacitated and harassed by quadcopter drones deployed from a container dropped earlier by a stealthed drone. I think there would be a lot of uses for such capability for special forces units.
Seriously, "harass" the pilots? A gentler, more playful war I suppose.
In military applications, it is almost always easier to permanently incapacitate people. Tech for temporary incapacitation is needed only in those very rare cases where we really, really need someone alive; where the capture is so vital that it's worth risking and often spending our troop lives to achieve that.
Yes. This scheme is bending over backwards to try not to kill people. Just killing them would be much simpler.
Not that I think the GP's idea is remotely plausible...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS
I believe it has the accuracy necessary against drones, people, damn near anything that moves actually.
Something with lasers might be feasible though.
void decide() {
while(((float)rand() / RAND_MAX) > 0.00000001);
push_the_button();
}
int main() { decide(); }
Shit like this is the reason your site will almost never get bookmarked. I definitely have no desire to come back to it.