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Artificial Killing Machine

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191 pointswglb57 comments

This link lead me to the API used by the project: http://www.dronestre.am/ followed by the twitter account linked to the api https://twitter.com/dronestream

I never thought the US conducted so many strikes, especially in Pakistan ...

You might be interested in this

https://youtu.be/K4NRJoCNHIs?t=672

Only a short quote, but quite powerful. The whole episode I think is worth it, but this always stuck with me.

thanks for checking it out. i'm the person who made it. there are also iOS and android apps if you'd like to get notified for each one...

Impressive. Would you mind explaining how you collect the data?

most of the heavy lifting is done by the bureau of investigative journalism. i just read the news articles they aggregate and fill in some metadata.

Wow. Thank you.

Rather like the Ukranian civil war, the world seems content to ignore the civil war in Pakistan and the fact that a global power is intervening on one side.

Just a reminder that a missile fired by a drone is no different than a missile fired by a manned jet or any other vehicle. Drones are simply a technology tool to help protect the lives of our own military. Drones are no different than something like stealth technology in that regard. I can't imagine that anyone would create an art project criticizing the US because the radar signature of our aircraft are too small. You shouldn't have a problem with how many people we kill with drones, you should have a problem with how many people we kill.

This is an easy mistake to make, when you can start automating stuff like this its a MASSIVE increase in scale that enables things that would have been nie impossible before, this qualitatively changes things.

Its like the argument about police drones, there is a fundamental qualitative difference between some cops driving/walking the beat, and every inch of a city under 100% constant surveillance and automatic cataloging of all activity.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

If these were automated drones that were killing people without human involvement, I would agree that they are a problem. However that isn't the case here. There are still flight and maintenance crews on the ground and there is still a human pulling the trigger. Drones just make things cheaper and less costly in terms of (friendly) human lives and they aren't alone in that regard.

Here is another comparison technology for you, satellite imagery. That has made military planning massively more effective as generals can now see the real time location of both our troops and our enemy. Should we stop using that because it allows us to kill our enemy too effectively without paying a high enough cost?

I never said it should, or shouldn't be used. Simply that it shouldn't be dismissed as being the same thing as what came before.

Well it is because it's still not automated. It just changes the location of the pilot.

I have no particular opinion on the matter, but I think the fact that it has made killing people more economical is noteworthy.

I can't see how drones made killing any more economical than high-altitude daylight bombing did in WWII and Vietnam.

Once you've established absolute air superiority, and the USAF is good at that these days, the bombers would be approximately as safe as people flying drones are now, and a single plane dropping literally tons of high explosive is a pretty efficient way to kill a lot of people in the target zone.

  > I can't see how drones made killing any more economical
  > than high-altitude daylight bombing did in WWII and Vietnam.

Presumably there is a USAF whitepaper or two that outlines exactly how much cheaper drones are (else: why are they using them?) but here are a few possibilities that spring to mind:

* The drones themselves are cheaper than the equivalent manned aircraft

* Supplies and support for the pilot are cheaper to procure on a base in the US than on an aircraft carrier or forward base

* No need to carry life support, etc so drone can carry more weapons or fuel

* Lower pilot training costs due to no KIA on drone loss and lower lifetime medical costs for survivable injuries.

>Presumably there is a USAF whitepaper or two that outlines exactly how much cheaper drones are (else: why are they using them?)

Have you considered that perhaps they are used for ethical reasons such as being a precision strike that kills less innocent bystanders than an indiscriminate bombing?

(Believe it or not the military does care about that sort of thing.)

Any technology that could allow for more precise bombings could be more easily fitted to a manned bomber because they wouldn't need the video link back to base. Remember, image quality matters a lot here since it restricts how well they can make out the target - innocent people have died because the video links on the drones were too poor-quality to see what they were doing and the operator's superiors jumped to conclusions. It's clearly about cost.

FTFY: Precision strike that kills precisely some people about who the operators have a vague hunch. Like women. Or children. http://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/drones-and-the-rise-of-the-...

All actions 2004 – January 31 2015

Total Obama strikes: 362 Total US strikes since 2004: 413 Total reported killed: 2,438-3,942 Civilians reported killed: 416-959 Children reported killed: 168-204

Only 168 children out of 3,942 that's 4% of killed children. If you accept this statistic as reasonable casualties then in my book you're a murderer.

> else: why are they using them?

Because, surprisingly, most people seem to prefer killing people in a manner that is more like a video game, safely at home, over actually going halfway across the world, to an actual war zone, where they actually are confronted with the destruction and havoc they wreak.

That's some really heavy shit to expect from most people.

And then they come back with all sorts of psychological trauma from the terrible things they've done and witnessed, getting those people the help and support to heal their mental wounds to live a relatively PTSD-free life isn't cheap either (as you mentioned in your fourth point).

And fortunately, because for the USA war is an export-only product, you have this option.

Sure there's economical factors, but I would not underestimate just how much nicer it is not having to actually go there and breathe the same air as the herds they're ordered to thin, or think about. Think of it as a Roomba, but for the desert.

There may be other ways to address the problem than banning the weapons entirely. When things are expensive people seem more likely to engage in them out of necessity than convenience. But when things are cheap people become more careless about employing them. While it is desirable that in a situation where you are already fighting a war and have no choice about it you have the best weapons, and the highest chance of victory, it is not necessarily desirable – in terms of thought that is put into employing violence as a tool to resolve a dispute – that before the war you have access to those things.

While it is madness to suggest that in a war people will not use their most effective weaponry, the relative costs of war influence who is going to become your enemy in the first place and the scope of the wars that you will fight. Consequently as the technological disparity increases, and the cost of war against any particular foe decreases, it becomes more important to enforce greater discretion in the use of those weapons by other means - and in some cases it would naturally follow that if you really are enforcing greater discretion in the use of weapons there are some situations in which you do not use them when you otherwise would.

Simply because you have a weapon does not mean you use it in every case.

Effecttively? Yes, it kills 'some people' effectively.

No one cares about the details like that those people are women, children, or unarmed men, because who would, if he judges based on his hunch from watching pixelated video feed, and there are no consequences.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/drones-and-the-rise-of-the-...

Are more civilians killed by drones or by cluster bombs[1] or "shock and awe" style campaigns?

Any civilian death is a terrible thing, but if drones reduce the rate of civilian death it's probably a good thing.

[1] even when we exclude cluster bombs that we the same colour as air-dropped food packages

I would think that the logic is that if there were no drones, the US army would drop no bombs at all. I wouldn't expect them to instead start carpet bombing cities in the middle east.

Reasoning in that way, the drones result in civilian deaths that wouldn't have happened without drones.

If you take away a kid's toys, they'll grow bored and start vandalizing public property in more creative ways.

> I wouldn't expect them to instead start carpet bombing cities in the middle east.

Except that is almost exactly what most drone-apologists are threatening the US will do instead when they argue they have to use drones because otherwise, well, they'll just have to kill more children and civilians.

So according to joering2's statistics, 4% of drone kills have been children.

Maybe we can agree that's probably a bad thing. Regardless of whether killing children provides a tactical advantage (they might grow up to become terrrists, after all).

However, your argument to me sounds a little like

"You want us to stop using drones? Guess we'll just have to go back to murdering even more children, then. Seriously, you're forcing our hand here."

And BTW, I have a brilliant idea. If you put drones over your roads that shoot missiles at drunk drivers (preferably as soon as they enter their car), it'll reduce civilian deaths! So it's probably a good thing. You only need to figure out a way to guesstimate blood-alcohol levels from a distance, but if you can get its fault tolerance below 24% (or 4% if they're drunk children), you'll have a pretty solid net-win in civilian casualties over having to transport your flying death robots halfway across the globe.

    import drone, random

    if drink() and drive() or random() < 0.24:
        get_blasted()

I still see it as a statement of just how many people we kill. Even if the problem with it is drone's, I still think the piece has merit. And beyond it's message, its construction and aesthetic is eerie and disturbing. It's built incredibly well.

They are no different functionally and perhaps morally (though on could argue that killing people remotely from your desk in Missouri is troubling).

They are VERY VERY different politically and therefore in reality, however. It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones. Maybe it's the low cost, or the fact that we don't risk American lives doing it, I'm not sure. If you looked at all the drone strikes over the last 10 years and replaced them with operations that involved american boots on the ground/f-16s/CIA wetwork etc it's very hard to imagine a scenario where that would have been acceptable to the American public.

Drones also have loitering capabilities that would be much more expensive to maintain with jets. Basically, I'm of the mind that drone strikes are seen as 'easy' and low risk politically so we end up killing more people than we would if we had to weigh the risks of more traditional means before we carried out the operation.

The public isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by a volunteer military. But nobody is proposing that we reinstate the draft, are we? And as a reminder, even the draft did not stop Vietnam - including My Lai, Agent Orange and uncountably many other atrocities. Why would eliminating drones do so? There is no drone-based explanation for why we accepted adventures like, say, Nicaragua. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not primarily enabled by drones. Maybe you can argue that drones "helped." But the real thing that feeds this is the insanely high approval ratings of a "war president" (at least at the beginning, before political objectives are clearly unwinnable) and the high electability of presidents who beat their chests about raising our military profile. Which is the fault of an irrational, undereducated, bloodthirsty electorate.

I will go even further here: in my opinion, drones have not really helped make the wars more palatable at all, on the contrary, they have actually been the single best, most emotionally impactful argument anyone can think to deploy against US military policy and the Obama administration in particular. THAT is the reason we keep hearing about them, not necessarily because they are more heinous, but because the issue is perceived as a great political vulnerability and political opportunity. It sounds better to say that things are now worse than ever because of Obama's unprecedented evil than to point out that the real problem is why we are bombing at all. I don't expect focus on the drone issue to have any real fruit in terms of reducing the impact of US wars.

I wonder if you even base your opinion that drone strikes are resulting in more deaths on any real data or if you made up your mind ahead of any data. And I suspect you are grossly overestimating the degree of care taken in bombing campaigns prior to the drone era. The risks to high-altitude bombers in the conditions we are using drones are not vast. The real risks are of overbombing, which is one of the objectively worst and most immoral aspects of bombing campaigns in decades past (think cluster bombs).

>It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones.

The public doesn't care if they're carried out by manned jets either. It's not like there's a huge risk to F-16 pilots zooming over guys with rusty AK-47s at 10,000 ft. From what I can glean the US has lost two strike aircraft (an F-15 and an F-16) in Afghanistan since 2001, neither of them to hostile action.

If there's any difference politically it likely arises from the fact that you typically use at least a 250 lb bomb in a manned strike, whereas drone attacks normally involve missiles with 20 lb warheads, which you can use to blow up, say, a single car without taking out the entire block.

> You shouldn't have a problem with how many people we kill with drones, you should have a problem with how many people we kill.

I agree whole heartedly. The problem is, before, you had to convince and train enough people to fly jets and kill. It was "one person for one jet". In theory, in about 3-5 years (if not now) we could have one pilot in a room flying over 3 different regions of the world, only taking over control to "go in for the kill". I'm confident as a hobbyist I could build a system that would let me fly 3 small quadcopters (drones) in my back yard with autonomous mode & then switching each to manual control 1 by one. The technology has outpaced our policy around peace. Drones represent the potential for a disproportionate amount of people to be put in harms way vs the old way.

But it is different!

A drone allows killing with zero risk of US life. That dramatically changes the likelihood that it will be used, for better or worse....

Just a reminder than a nuclear bomb is no different than an army killing 6 million people like the holocaust did.

Sarcasm aside, you are talking nonsense, when you can write 'kill.everyoneWhoLooksLike("armed muslin")' without having to actually pull the trigger from your jet aiming at each group of guys that just seem to talk and passing time everything changes drastically, specially when you can show the former is a lot cheaper (in lives AND money)

When a pilot and his crew hit a target, it means the person ordering that attack thought it was worthwhile enough to risk the lives of his men.

If a target isn't important enough to risk the lives of our own military, is it really just to target it?

> there is still a human pulling the trigger.

There is a human pulling the trigger in New Mexico and an anonymous on-screen chat message from Washington informing the operator that, no that little figure they just accidentally blasted halfway across the world was most definitely a "dog".

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-aft...

>> For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

THAT is the difference between a missile fired by a manned jet or other vehicle. Complete detachment from the people they're killing.

"When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world."

See how that goes? They didn't "really" murder someone, they push a button and someone died on the other side of the world. And I think that's not an incorrect view of what it is. There's various degrees of personal up-closeness when you actually kill another human, with bare hands, a knife, a gun, grenades/explosives, that bring with them gruweling psychological effects because for most people it is so deeply wrong ... and on the very other end of the spectrum there is "press a button and someone dies on the other side of the world", just a few steps removed from "buying a hot dog makes you somewhat responsible for a number of animal's deaths".

If that doesn't disgust you to the core of your being, then I don't quite know how I could explain it more clearly.

>> Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

>> "Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

>> "Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

>> "Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

>> Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

(BTW, this is not the same article I read a few years ago, it seems to fail to mention that Bryant was fired over this incident a few days after)

Reminds me of a short story written in 1914 by Franz Kafka called "In the Penal Colony"[1]. It's very much worth a read, an English translation is available at [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony

[2] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm

SPOILER:

In the story the condemned prisoners aren't told their sentence. There is a elaborate machine - described in much detail - that carves the sentence into the skin of the convict. The machine works (or used to work) in such precision, that after exactly 24 hours an epiphany about the misdeed and death occur simultaneously.

That's not the spoiler.

After rereading the story: No, it's really not the spoiler.

The current nearly worldwide drone campaign that the US is engaged in is one of the least ethical things this country has ever done. It has proven to be a mostly indiscriminate weapon, little better than using car bombs, and it has not only eroded America's moral high-ground on the international stage, it has in many cases destroyed a favorable image of the US and turned entire populations against us, for very little tangible benefit.

Less ethical than the systemic genocide perpetrated against Native Americans, I think not.

One of...

If you consider drone strikes to be indiscriminate, compare the upper bound of about 6,000[1] or so drone strike casualties over more than a decade to the 90,000[2] or so Vietnam bombing casualties, which in turn is dwarfed by the World War 2 bombing casualties[3]. Compared to the alternative of using traditional bombers or using ground forces, drone strikes represent a huge reduction in civilian casualties.

I don't understand the people who protest drone strikes. War is hell - if your country engages in any sort of violent military intervention, there will be civilian casualties. I can get behind opposing unnecessary usage of military force; I can get behind opposing attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation that we aren't at war with. Protesting the tools used to conduct war instead of the war itself makes little sense to me, particularly when that tool marks a dramatic improvement in reducing civilian casualties.

[1] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...

[2] http://thevietnamwar.info/operation-rolling-thunder/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strat...

I think that being unmanned is largely what makes it seem acceptable to engage in attacks on nations we aren't at war with (or rather, to not label it as a war when we attack them).

The drone system enables not a big war, but a war small enough it can be pretended away. It also represents a new kind of war: not against an opposing national force, but against a list of individuals whose names are computed from the global surveillance programme.

Yes, if you look at drones-the-technology the protest looks a bit mistargeted. But that's just because it's a convenient label for drone-bombing-the-politics.

Compare nuclear weapons. You could say that they're just another increase in scale from the lethality of World war 2. But the politics (mutual assured destruction etc, antiproliferation etc) are different.

It's all relative. Compared to Dresden, small guided missiles are positively humane. Heck, the hammer that was dropped on Fallujah makes a drone look meek. War is by design very ugly.

Visualizations like these are incredible and I want to see more like them. We're at a time where data wealth and transparency is becoming more and more sought out and computers/microcontrollers are incredibly cheap.

An installation like this one would be thought provoking in an art gallery or event space, especially if it's pulling raw data. The silence, or even onslaught of noise, would be deafening. Presentations like these give a much more tangible understanding than points on a graph.

If art installations of this type became more commonplace we could begin to see dissenters manipulating them to make counterpoints. I'm sure someone with a favorable opinion of the drone program is already working towards a method to exploit this piece.

I think an answer to this is raw data. Data is data and you can of course massage the information to do what you want[1] and it can also be argued that it's been misinterpreted and improperly reported since the beginning of time. The truth is that the only "true" judgement that can be made is by the person who reads and interprets the raw data. If we make more "actualizations" like this where it takes a raw information stream and leaves it to the viewer to interpret, it will become less exploitable.

Akin to a thermometer, there are reporters and newscasters who can tell you the weather outside and we hope they are not deceitful but if you look at a thermometer, you have the raw data and you can make that judgement yourself.

[1]http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/lie-factor.php

Nothing really new in this. The people who have access to the data today misrepresent it already. Or fail to publish it, or collect it, to avoid arguments against their actions.

Example, insufficient data is collected about people killed by the police in the U.S.: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/18/police-killin...

This is such a beautiful art object. Interesting, does it author know that white is colour of death in the Middle East?

I think something like this is equally (or more) apt to the meat industry, just replace humans in this with say cow or pigs on the assembly line.

(If you use headphones you might want to turn them down until you hear the volume of the cap guns in the video.)

First thought those guns were automated drones flying around killing people

Worth mentioning the Red Alert : Israel iOS app. Informs you every time a missile is launched against Israel, rather distressing considering every notification means someone could/did die - and how often those notifications occur.

A Palestinian version would be much more alarming considering that 10 times more palestinians are killed compared to Israelis.

There's a weekly data report on civilians harmed on each side of that conflict maintained by the UN at http://www.ochaopt.org/reports.aspx?id=104&page=1 . It's not real-time but the format is standardized enough to make an app out of I guess.

I thought your 10 times sounded a bit exaggerated, but apparently I was wrong and right. According to the UN site Kliment listed below, in 2014 87 Israelis died vs 2300 Palestinians.

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