>“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”
And no less scary, 15-40% of the time a civilian is hit instead of the correct target. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
And given the dubious right of the CIA to hit there intended target in the first place, the acceptance of UAV strikes is disturbing to me.
Imagine when drones the size of dragonflies carry needles containing poison to assassination targets. Today's drones are very crude in comparison.
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.
It would start with heads of state and rich people with enemies.
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.
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.
Sometimes the goal of military action is not conquest. Well timed assassinations are hugely powerful (by foreign and domestic groups). One look at the presidential motorcade (or at the entourage of machine gun carrying thugs that accompany politicians in 3rd world countries) should make that quite clear.
You clearly don't watch enough action movies. The historical record of virtually all attempts on a US presidents life being the result single individual acting alone, have no relevance. :P
in 'diamond age', neal stephenson describes a future where nanotech devices are a constant threat, and cities are surrounded by grids of devices that scan for incoming threats and destroy them.
also there's a cult centered around a subconsciousness born in a group sex ritual.
World War II wasn't unavoidable. If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed. Specifically, the unsustainable reparations on Germany, and the French decision to occupy the German coal regions in the 1920s, destabilized the German economy and destroyed the Weimar Republic.
> If the West, particularly France, had pursued a less vindictive peace with Germany after the first world war, the circumstances that brought Hitler to power would not have existed.
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...
The French were outclassed in all ways, their techniques were completely outdated. For instance using motorcycle messengers to transfer orders instead of telephone/radio communications, they could not respond fast enough to German Blitzkrieg.
Actually, the French/UK and German powers were pretty much evenly balanced. Woodrow Wilson's meddling in the war and especially in the "peace conference" afterward was the major factors that led to World War Two.
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.
I always thought it would be cool if a company built a big bird's nest tower in cities that would host a bunch of flying drones. Then, consumers could rent the video-capture drones online to fly over approved areas, upon which the drones would return to nest for re-fueling. Think maybe you could subsidize the cost (possibly even make a profit) with the video data, or by streaming some feeds for the population to watch. Though have no idea of feasibility (FAA, equipment, real estate), I do like the idea of eyes in the sky for consumer benefit. Maybe something like this could be used for defense - giving population more awareness of airspace.
UAVs are currently not allowed to be flown by commercial entities in US airspace. If/when that changes it will be fascinating to watch the variety of startups that crop up to take advantage of it.
However individuals can fly RC planes. What about companies making RC planes? Are they allowed to test fly them? Set one of those planes up with a deadly payload (use your imagination here) and you have a UAV...
This would have to be constrained to consumers experienced with flying RC planes. Imagine the number of planes crashing due to the incompetency of the operator if anyone could rent an RC plane over the internet.
However, I really like the idea. It would be like google street view, only you are the driver -- in the sky.
This technology would also work great for nature movies and nature flight trips. Imagine you could rent rent an UAV , travel in Africa , from your home or a place with a giant screen , follow the great elephants crossing a river as if you were there.
Right, because what Elephants really need is to be hounded by a swarm of drones piloted by people from countries that are too lazy to even go see the world in person?
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.
Every time I've put a new upper limit on how weird a place the world really is someone will find a reference to something forcing me to revise the previous one.
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.
That's the problem with these robots. The USA has now set the precedent that the robots can go anywhere in the world and blow anyone up that we label a terrorist. This is dangerous and stupid. Of course it was Bush that invented the endless war (how do we win this war? are we supposed to to kill every young muslim that hates us?), but Bush preferred kidnapping people and sticking them in secret prisons, Obama prefers using robots to assassinate from afar, no messy legal challenges that way.
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.
Once drones become prolific, they will start killing drones instead of people and maybe we can have a bloodless war the same way we have paperless offices.
I'm going to take an optimistic stance on this topic and say that war technology evolves; we shouldn't be scared of it just because it was sci-fi 10 years ago. I think the development of the nuclear bomb was more scary than some line-manufactured drones.
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.
"It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee
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."
> Therefore, we do run the risk of making war seem less terrible and, thus, becoming more fond of it.
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.
I'm not exactly disagreeing, just noting that I read the opposite recently:
"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."
Martins emotions pale compared to those of the innocent civilians that are no longer around.
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.
Being a pascifist is a luxury that cannot necessarily be afforded by everyone. Competition is an inextricable part of life, and military force still trumps most other forms of competition as a last resort. The next disruption in military technology has arrived, and those that dominate this type of warfare will likely dominate future battles, just as the American air force has allowed the American military to dominate since WW2. I wish it weren't so, but having a strong military is still important, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. If you're not the strongest, and you're not friends with the strongest, you lose a lot of self determinism. So, it's important that we focus on making the best unmanned combat vehicles possible, if only to be able to maintain the luxury of pacifism, because people in other countries don't necessarily share your moral qualms.
I'm not a pacifist. You hit me I hit back. But I decide that on a case-by-case basis and to give others the ability to indiscriminately kill people that I have no beef with sounds like a very bad idea.
I agree with the sentiment. I work on computer vision systems that have application to this area and there's a line beyond which I won't go. I'm not sure where it is exactly. For instance, there are researchers working on human detection for these systems, which can have applications in attacking and in avoiding; the tech is independent of intent.
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.
I disagree. Nuclear bombs are a "drop and forget" kind of munition. Killing people with drones is similar in that your side doesn't face much danger. But, once you show a picture of a city completely destroyed and skin melting off of the bodies of your enemies, the general public will determine that war is terrible.
I wonder how long it will be until the pilots and support staff of these drones start getting car-bombs or some nasty surprises in the mail.
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.
Unfortunately (and without any sarcasm) the answer is yes if youre American. But there are a few more countries where it's ok too. Russia and the polonium saga springs to mind, although responsibility wasn't claimed unlike the UAV hit. Any other recent citizen assassinations spring to mind? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvin...
Just like we have a moratorium on the use of chemical weapons we ought to have one on drones. Not that it would ever be ratified.
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.
"If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say?"
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.
When there are more and more nations with drones, it will be harder to trace them back to some nation-state.
And with technology-only attacks there is no longer necessarily a nation-state with army behind it at all. Just an organization with a lot of capital. China could deny being involved. Or maybe the drones were infected with a computer virus (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004)
I think the scariest part of this drone trend is the opportunity to wage war without losing human life. This shift in risk will dramatically reduce the barrier to starting a war and will further reinforce the power of those already on top.
The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side. If we could have war without losing any lives, that sounds cool—stick in some cameras and we'd happily pay to watch.
Yeah, the horror of war without lost life is something I think the survivors of, oh, say, the Hundred Years War, would call (in the modern parlance) a First World Problem.
War is becoming much safer. The world is too. Fascinating article on it here. http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker
However I'd love to see any evidence showing drones keep deaths down in war. Maybe in the future, but right now they make life very unsafe in places like Pakistan, which given it's allied to America is bizarre.
Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to Boltcode.
Read Kiln People by David Brin. They make short lived clones of themself (including memory), then the clones fight a full war.
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.
I find it rather ironical that you oppose an implicit philosophical position from some book by explaining another philosophical position, solely supported by another book.
That's not just supported 'by another book' but it matches what I feel about how we should treat clones. After all, if a clone is identical you'd have to come up with some pretty contorted reasoning to argue that they are 'not people'.
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.
I guess you didn't read the book. It's pretty clear they are in fact not real people. For one thing they can only live a day or two before decaying. (If a clone can live longer, does that make it a person?)
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.
Which would work for anything you'd let ride on a game of dice. But for serious things you're going to get together for the victory celebration and shoot the human behind the drone army.
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.
>The problem is that lives will still be lost, just not by our side.
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.
That's a pretty good point but are there no situations where drones are used instead of "boots on the ground"? For instance, would the US use "precision air power" instead of drones against targets in Pakistan, if we didn't have drones?
I really have no idea though, I can't even pretend to be informed on this.
What drones give you cheaply is persistence. Let's say you identify this week's Al Queda #2. You know where he is, but he lives in a compound with 20 other people. Drones are slow, use little fuel, and you can swap out the people flying them, so (depending on the model) a single drone can loiter over the guy's compound for up to 24 hours. You watch him until there aren't any innocent people around, then you shoot a missile.
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.
It's theoretically possible (although definitely implausible) that drone/remote warfare will play out on the economic battlefield, rather than the human one.
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.
An area this article does not go into is how the increased use of robotics in the military could cause the military to classify large swaths of it as controlled weapons research. This would limit the ability of researchers and companies to publish or even work in that area.
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.
What I'm waiting for is this technology to be open to business and consumer solutions. I dream of a world where Amazon implements drone technology into their SOA fulfillment centers and makes it possible for orders to be delivered in hours or minutes instead of days.
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.
I was tweeting the other day that we now live in a world where the president of the United States can, without judicial review, assassinate with robots an American Citizen living abroad because of their speech and influence on terrorists.
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.
> You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him.
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.
We should never torture anyone for any reason, period. Including that in your statement above makes it sound like your endorse torture, I hope that you do not. We should also never, kill anyone who isn't a direct threat (e.g. on the battle field, shooting a cops/civilians, etc) regardless of where they are and whether or not they're US civilians. The assassination of OBL falls under the same idea, he should have been captured and tried by a jury.
Following the Vietnam era, planners began to fear that the US would never again go to war. War was just to messy, too cruel, too close to home. It created amputees, homeless vets, PTSD, etc.
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.
I'm more interested in the day when there are so many drones, they spend more time fighting each other and forget about the humans all together. We may never even see them, dogfighting above the clouds, save for a the perpetual flutter of broken parts falling from the heavens.
Another possibility.. cities protected by phalanxes of model rocket sized guided missiles scanning perpetually for enemy drones.
That's nonsensical. The chances of drone armies being so perfectly matched they always fight to a stalemate are basically zero. Ultimately one side will win, and then it will have a free hand. It's no different than a conventional air war in that regard.
How about the fact that we're doing it, period?
http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...