I have incredibly mixed feelings about these technologies. On the one hand, it is infinitely safer for our pilots to be in an air-conditioned control room somewhere outside of Vegas. For saving the lives of american soldiers, this is an amazing step forward. This is good.
On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree. While the drone pilots may grasp the full ramifications of their actions, it's a certainty that the general public does not. We see no body bags and hear no casualty reports. There are no lists of the fallen. Sending out a platoon of 18 year old kids is difficult. Sending out a squadron of MQ-9 reapers is easy.
War is horrific beyond imagining. The emotional toll has always been shared by both sides to some degree, and I would like to believe that such costs act as a deterrent. I worry about the decision-making of a society that has their portion of that horror comfortably abstracted away.
"I have incredibly mixed feelings about these technologies. On the one hand, it is infinitely safer for our pilots to be in an air-conditioned control room somewhere outside of Vegas. For saving the lives of american soldiers, this is an amazing step forward. This is good.
On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree."
I wouldn't worry too much. Within five years, the "bad guys" will have drones (or equally lethal weaponry) too. Then their combatants would be safely ensconced somewhere too while pursuing the destruction of the "good guys". Technology is a great leveller, over time.
Assuming they're continuing to fight insurgents (i.e. not fighting another superpower) I think the technological distance between the US and its enemies is a lot more than 5 years. Care to make a LongBet?
These pilots are fighting wars from Las Vegas. The enemy may take action to remove them from the fight, and collaterally damage any local civilians who get in their way. The war would seem much less abstract then.
The body bags stopping a war is a recent phenomena. Leaders have not hesitated to send the youth out to fight. Look at the daily death tolls from the Battle of the Bulge vs Iraq. Technology made the viewing of a war and its horrors in real-time. If we can keep our people safe, I am all for it.
Also, a person who could get shot at makes snap and sometimes bad decisions (ex. killing bystander). The dude in the office can be positive (failure just looses a drone not his life).
I used to feel this way as well, but now I'm not so sure. I think this is more related to social inertia than it is social mores.
During the American Civil War, a bloody struggle of brother and against brother involving carnage on a scale never seen before, families would bring picnic baskets out to watch the battle. When the first photographs of all the carnage starting coming in, it had no affect at all on public support. In fact, the pictures were marveled and praised.
More primitive societies that live with death on a daily basis have no problem dealing with it up close and personal -- and they have no problem either going to war or sending others to war. Later societies -- especially those with a pampered middle class and instantaneous communications -- have all kinds of problems with any use of violence at all that might inconvenience them. It may be one button that kills a hundred enemies (making the assumption that only combatants are killed and the war is just) but there will be videos of it instantaneously on the web and commenters from all over the world will weigh in on the atrocity of "war by pushbutton"
This is not new, though. All it takes to start a nuclear war (which will inevitably kill millions) is a turn of the key in some bunker.
Eventually, war will consist of people hiding in underground bunkers controlling big robots to do the fighting. Then maybe we'll all realize how pointless war actually is.
The real problem is that it won't be too long before an individual can afford this kind of technology. The abstraction you're worried about will diminish dramatically at that point.
It's surreal how they "drive to work/war" then come home that night. Having said that from the documentary you also get the impression that they do treat it like they are at war.
It's only a matter of time before there will be drone soldiers, too. War will be very expensive (or very profitable, depending on your perspective) with minimal risk to friendly people, reducing the main reason democracies don't like wars.
War will be casualty-free for societies with drone soldiers until both sides have this technology.
Building an AUV is ridiculously cheap, and can be done with off-the-shelf components. Moreover, other countries have learned from the success of our drone programs, and are rapidly developing their own. It is almost a certainty that we will have drones deployed against us in our next major conflict.
People tend to forget that there was a brief period where America was the sole nuclear power, and we could destroy whole countries with negligible risk to 'friendlies'. We had very similar discussions then. However, that monopoly of power didn't last, and the costs of deploying those weapons suddenly became infinite.
I suspect that a similar symmetry will arise with robotic weapons. War will get weirder, but it isn't going to get any less risky.
Perhaps one outcome of nuclear power (and other developments) is that the main conflicts now are not nation vs. nation but nation vs. network - and in that division it's only the nations that hold nuclear power, so far.
I doubt networks will respond by creating their own drones. Building a drone may not be too hard, but building one that can be operated from the other side of the world is much harder. Furthermore, it turns the conflict to an arms race in which they will find it extremely hard to beat wealthier nations.
It's not a matter of time, there already are drone soldiers. They aren't fully autonomous yet but that's just a matter of further systems integration and software development.
I have to think that the current/next generation of young gamers are going to be well equipped for this kind of job. Games like Modern Warfare 2 already incorporate things like drone strikes, and these kids are becoming experts at multi-tasking while keeping up their in game reflexes.
I've read in another report that some of these systems' controls are already modeled after PlayStation/etc - this way they get to build on game manufacturer's years of usability testing as well as make it easier for recruits to learn to use the system.
On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree. While the drone pilots may grasp the full ramifications of their actions, it's a certainty that the general public does not. We see no body bags and hear no casualty reports. There are no lists of the fallen. Sending out a platoon of 18 year old kids is difficult. Sending out a squadron of MQ-9 reapers is easy.
War is horrific beyond imagining. The emotional toll has always been shared by both sides to some degree, and I would like to believe that such costs act as a deterrent. I worry about the decision-making of a society that has their portion of that horror comfortably abstracted away.