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Rise of the Robot Squadrons
Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'
Sapient?
I think you mean "sentient".
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sapient
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Congress, and thus monied corporations and lobbyists still have the power of the purse to decide whether or not our weapon systems can be autonomous or not.
Looks like you had a typo.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
you decided to ignore "shitty" armies in your calculations
Yes, because shitty armies are unlikely to have access to high-tech swarm-drones (or at least they won't have more than, like, FIVE, tops!), which is what the original discussion was about.
As for your statistics ... your sources contradict each other, and during my cursory check I was unable to locate any hard, credible data to confirm these claims. The numbers seem inflated at best.
Even if accurate, though, 9,600 deaths per year on a planet with 6 billion people is pretty much insignificant. To put that in perspective, more than 28,000 people are murdered every year in Russia alone. Another 16,000 are murdered in the US every year.
It looks like this:
Landmines: 1.6 per 1,000,000 per year
Murder US: 53 per 1,000,000 per year
Murder RU: 200 per 1,000,000 per year
So, no, I wouldn't consider landmines a huge problem. They suck, yeah, but are little more than a nuisance.