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Human Rights Watch: Petition Against Robots On the Battle Field
New submitter KublaCant writes "'At this very moment, researchers around the world – including in the United States – are working to develop fully autonomous war machines: killer robots. This is not science fiction. It is a real and powerful threat to humanity.' These are the first words of a Human Rights Watch Petition to President Obama to keep robots from the battlefield. The argument is that robots possess neither common sense, 'real' reason, any sense of mercy nor — most important — the option to not obey illegal commands. With the fast-spreading use of drones et al., we are allegedly a long way off from Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics being implanted in autonomous fighting machines, or into any ( semi- ) autonomous robot.
A 'Stop the Killer Robots' campaign will also be launched in April at the British House of Commons and includes many of the groups that successfully campaigned to have international action taken against cluster bombs and landmines. They hope to get a similar global treaty against autonomous weapons. The Guardian has more about this, including quotes from well-known robotics researcher Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen)
Fred Saberhagen's "Beserker" series.
Aside from touching on the subject at hand, it's just some crackin' good sci-fi. :)
I don't know if we'd ever reach that point ourselves, but in that series, an unknown (and now extinct) alien race, losing a war and desperate, created "doomsday" machines that were simply programmed to kill all life. They were self-replicating, self-aware AIs that took their task seriously, too.
Then again, I ask myself what some jihadist might do, if given half the chance ... . .. ..
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
As far as I can tell, we need to focus on dealing with the presence of drones and "killer robots," not how to prevent them. Like it or not, 'progress marches on'.
There is no satisfactory definition, just as there is no definition for "Artificial Intelligence". Things change and so does our acceptance of what is commonplace vs. what is considered novel.
This message is sponsored by Sarah and John Connor. With special consideration from Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo.
sudo make me a sandwich
Hey, James Cameron, are you the submitter??
The automomous Terminator-style robots the summary refers to are far from becoming a battlefield standard, much to the disappointment of the /. crowd and sci-fi nerds.
Predator drones et al., like all current robotic devices in the battlefield, still have a human being in charge making all the decisions, so the points raised are completely moot.
The drones America uses are piloted by humans. The other robot in use by the military is the one that disables bombs. It also is remote controlled by a human. I don't think the military has any non piloted robots deployed in combat. Even a turret would be too dangerous. An automated turret could kill our own troops. Closest thing we have is landmines.
if we could just get the robots to only fight other robots...
loyalty above all, save honor
in the 1890's Tesla staged naval battles in Madison Square Garden where remote-controlled boats did battle against each other. His goal was to have robots fighting in wars as our proxies, so men wouldn't have to die. But eventually, it will be man vs machine, Terminator-style.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
If you think about a virus for a second, it's the same thing. You can't reason with a virus. It doesn't make moral decisions. It just does what its DNA programs it to do, and it's even more dangerous because it's self-replicating. We need to deal with autonomous robots the same way we deal with bio-warfare.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Depending on how one defines "robot", this will be extremely unlikely.
I don't mean to be the dark figure in this conversation, but I think it's inevitable that robots will be used on the battlefield, just like people are going to continue to use cluster bombs, land mines, dum-dum bullets and other horrible devices. The reason is that they're effective.
War is a measurement of who is most effective at holding territory. It is often fought between uneven sides, for example the Iraqi army in their 40-year-old tanks going out against the American Apaches who promptly slaughtered them. Sometimes, there are seeming upsets but often there's an uneven balance behind the scenes there as well.
Robots are going to make it to the battlefield because they are effective not as killing machines, but as defensive machines. They're an improvement over land mines, actually. The reason for this is that you can programmatically define "defense" where offense is going to require more complexity.
Already South Korean is deploying robotic machine gun-equipped sentries on its border. Why put a human out there to die from sniper fire when you can have armored robots watching the whole border?
Eventually, robots may make it to offensive roles. I think this is more dubious because avoiding friendly fire is difficult, and using transponders just gives the enemy homing beacons. In the meantime, they'll make it to the battlefield, no matter how many teary people sign petitions and throw flowers at them.
the post you're replying to is one line long, and you still can't read it right? When did Stalin or Hitler when Nobel Peace Prize?
Unfortunately you're both wrong. Mao wins that particular genocide competition with a death total between 45 million and 75 million.
I fail to see the difference between a robot killing off a group of people and a religious extremist strapping explosives to his four year old son before he tells him to "go say 'hi' to those nice soldiers over there."
How many times must it be said? Asimov's 3 "laws" have nothing to do with real robotics, future or present. They were a _plot device_, designed to make his (fictional) stories more interesting. Even mentioning them at all in this context implies ignorance of actual robotics in reality. In reality, robot 'brains' are computers, programmed with software. Worry more about bugs in that software, and lack of oversight on the people controlling them.
Actually, Mao is first, followed by Stalin and then Hitler.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Killer robots can't be a government only option =D
This led to clever people developing submachine guns.
Give it a couple decades and you'll be able to download plans for your own battlebot and then create it on your printer
This article is absolute garbage. Almost everything in that Guardian article is misinformed and sensationalist.
"fully autonomous war machines"? Care to give an example? I've follow this stuff pretty closely in the news on top of researching AI myself. And from what I have seen no one is working on this. Hell, we've only just started to crack autonomous vehicles. They site X-37 space plane for gods' sake. Everything about that is classified so how do they know it is autonomous?
My favourite gem has to be this one: "No one on your side might get killed, but what effect will you be having on the other side, not just in lives but in attitudes and anger?". Pretty sure that keeping your side alive while attacking your opponent has been the point of every weapon that has ever been developed.
How about we replace all soldiers on all battlefields with these robots? That way there's no issue with robots killing people.
When did Stalin or Hitler when Nobel Peace Prize?
By then, the Nobel Committee had some shreds of dignity left. Yet I'd count hundreds of millions of children forced to sing songs in school that call Stalin the "sun of humanity", "father of peace", and so on.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There's a lawyer standing behind the drone pilot. He's there to make sure no laws are violated. So it isn't the drone, or the ROV pilot, it's the lawyer who makes the kill decision. So if you are complaining about it, ask yourself who makes the laws? More importantly, in other countries that are about to become drone capable, what sorts of laws do they have preventing arbitrary kills?
robots killing robots
wars settled in a clash of machinery without any humans for miles around
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are all indications that the coming robotic revolution will usher in a new era of human peace and prosperity. Robots have no emotion, no bias. Imagine deploying a few hundred (or thousand) semi-autonomous robotic peacekeepers into a conflict zone. They maintain the peace 24/7, they never tire, they are alert and objective in their duties. War is traditionally an incredibly wasteful and expensive exercise. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan! $1 trillion and thousands of allied casualties. Deploy a robot army and watch the costs come down. No need for living quarters, no need of food or water, logistics becomes cheaper in every aspect.
Like them or loath them, Drones are incredibly efficient in what they do. They are very lethal, but they are precise. How many innocents died in the decades of embargo on Iraq and the subsequent large scale bombings under Bush? Estimates run into over 100,000. Use of drones in Libya, Mali, Yemen, Pakistan have reduced costs by hundreds of millions and prevented thousands of needless casualties. Drones are the future and the US has an edge that will not give up.
Robots are not alive.
There is no true sacrifice of blood and souls when robots take the place of soldiers in battle. In my opinion, that brings them up to WMD in terms of being able to inflict loads of casualties with little risk to the aggressor.
Only humans should be on the battlefield killing each other, robots killing robots is just so inhumane.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I agree! No robots in the battlefield! I also propose that all battles from now on be fought by avatars in a game. Humans should be prohibited to engage in real battles, where they act as merciless robots, "just following orders", even "illegal" ones. A new Geneva convention should be summoned immediately to enforce these new rules of engagement!
In robot drone murders and you morons think he will sign something? Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner that has killed the most innocent women and children yet!
I believe Yasar Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, and Le Duc Tho all currently lead Obama the "Number of Innocents Killed by a Nobel Peace Prize Winner" race.
Without "autonomous war machines" we've managed to firebomb cities (with a nice 3 hour gap between bombing runs so that fire fighters and so on would be putting out the first run's fires when the second run hit), mass murder civilians, drop atomic bombs on cities, use chemical weapons, and everything in between. I don't think feelings of mercy and pity and an ability to not follow illegal orders makes much of a difference.
In the Asimov books, the inventor of the Robot Brain pretty much invented and designed the Positronic Brains so they the whole underlying foundation was just a large spaghetti of stuff... and the brain wouldn't function without it. And part of the spaghetti was the 3-laws... remove them and it all falls apart like a house of cards.
So it wasn't so much an issue of "Manufacturers installing the 3-laws-patch" but that the 3-laws were built into the brain's foundation. And that there weren't really ways to make the brain without having all of that stuff there.
Though in one of (Asimov's?) books, some genius designed a Gravitronic brain from scratch in such a way that it didn't have the 3 laws built in. Thus it was smaller and cheaper. But I forget if it was an Asimov book or just someone that borrowed his rules and such.
My main problem with using robots (or, more likely, remotely piloted-semi-autonomous war machines) on the battlefield is that it makes war too easy. Right now, drones aside, war is a costly matter. You need to put actual lives at risk and that acts as a check on what generals/politicians would want to use troops for. Want to invade North Korea and Iran to stop them from being a threat once and for all? Well, that's going to wind up costing tons of lives which is going to make it harder to sell to the public. (Lives on the other side count too, but - let's face it - they don't count as much because it is all too easy to dehumanize the enemy.)
However, let's assume millions of soldiers were seated at a "video game console" while their robotic avatars were out in the battlefield killing North Koreans or Iranians. Suddenly, the only cost is money spent on damaged avatars. Spending billions on war can eventually cause public sentiment to shift against the war, but not the same way as the prospect of thousands of body bags coming home does. I fear that, once war becomes a "real life video game", we'll become a much more war-mongering nation due to the reduced "cost" of war.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Stalin's regime (officially) executed between 3.5 and 5 million (most of it in post civil war era, check how it went in post-revolution France), even assuming all of them were innocent, how could you compare that to what Hitler did and come to the conclusion, he did less???
Stalin was an ass hole but you putting him in front of Hitler (who was fine with exterminating entire nation) shocks me. You took too much anti-kommies propaganda too seriously guys.
are coming
There have been many situations where you've had humans in on the ground, one gets killed, and the slain soldier's buddies snap and decide to massacre an entire village. I'm not really sure what part of merciful warfare autonomous robots are threatening.
It is not the "officially" executed that counts it is the millions that died due to starvation as a result of his policies. As such Stalin is way beyond Hitler. That includes the millions who died due to the fact that Stalin had "purged" the Red Army of all the effective officers who could have stopped Hitler much much sooner.
His machines weren't "robots" any more than Predator drones are: they were remote controlled by radio.
Yes. That is probably why he stated that they were remote-controlled.
Anyone can be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize...
These days it's everywhere.
That's not a new phenomenon for our species - heck, back in the days of ancient Greece, one couldn't throw a stone without hitting at least one or two "oracles."
Of course, they at least had the excuse of rampant mercury poisoning...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_RCWS
These turrets count I think. Israel has at times said they are keeping a man in the loop, but the technology doesn't require it, and at times they have said they are in
"see-shoot" mode. This is essentially indiscriminate area denial that is easier to turn off than mines. It does have the computer vision and targeting aspects of a killer robot, just not the path finding and obstacle avoidance parts.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
wanna kill all humans?
Here today, gone tomorrow
People really get very preferrential about their mode of death. Robots seem to offend them more than the more civilized death of a soldier. Me? Hell, I'd prefer to die in the glory of combating a metal beast. That would be far more glorious than fighting a mere mortal.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Sorry, but if you haven't been paying attention the "European union" is a Laurette. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/15/un-backed-troops-accused-rape-congo or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_peacekeeping#Reception or just take the UN's word for it here: https://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/fatalities/documents/stats_1.pdf . The UN claims to only whack a under 200 a year.
The 3 laws of robotics were a brilliant development as a plot device. But I don't think there's even a theoretical way to implement them on actual technology that wouldn't be trivial to circumvent. There is not a single organization that makes "robot brains" that can build in these laws. There isn't a way to build this into a processor, and even if there were, you could modify the data sent to the processor. Also, there would always be a manufacturer willing to leave them out once the price got high enough, my guess is that, for most manufacturers, that price would be around the cost of a current processor plus a dollar.
Obama already leads the way in robot drone murders and you morons think he will sign something? Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner that has killed the most innocent women and children yet!
(1) The drones aren't robots, they are controlled by a live operator and wouldn't even be covered by this proposal.
(2) It's really quite a stretch to believe that drone attacks have killed more innocents than Kissinger's wholesale bombing of Cambodia or Arafat's indiscriminate suicide bombing attacks.
But yeah, don't let facts get in the way of a good flame ...
The author gave the following reasons against autonomous war robots:
|| Robots possess neither common sense... ||
Me: This is true, but isn't that the point? Someone behind the curtain has common sense? For example, the current generation of drones in use aren't intelligent, but the people flying them are making the decisions (or rather, their superiors). We need to separate the ED-209 vs. drone conversation as I'm pro drone, anti-ED-209 style military robot.
|| 'real' reason ||
Me: See above. Our current drones do have "real reasoning" aka, there is a real human operating them.
|| any sense of mercy ||
Me: Actually, "mercy" can cause problems. Offering mercy, only to have that terrorist return (with additional knowledge). Also, wouldn't an operator show more mercy with a drone? AKA, if they "kill" the drone, nobody dies. I see this as a Win/Win for the use of drones.
|| nor — most important — the option to not obey illegal commands. ||
Actually, this is where you lost me. Our current generation of drones are scrutinized in a number of ways. Everything is recorded, the operators are in direct communication with their superiors and their peers (other operators), and the fog of war is very different. I could argue that the "illegal commands" could actually be reduced. What's more likely, a person under the stress of survival making an illegal/horrible decision or the person sitting in an air conditioned building operating a robot 7000+ miles away making an illegal/horrible decision, when being recorded?
All that said, there is something very real about us having real humans on the ground in many places. That said, if we could minimize human casualties by implementing limited drones, why wouldn't we do that?
Officially? Really? Read up about the Kulaks before you talk about the "official" numbers.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Oh shit, open source really is going to destroy the world.
If the US and Great Britain refuse to produce these machines, somebody else will. And good luck trying to get every freaking country in the world to sign your "global agreement" (Iran and North Korea, anyone?). If we outlaw killer robots, only the outlaws will have killer robots.
snip...
We are afraid of body bags coming home and we're afraid of collateral damage.
snip...
Hmm
I don't believe the military is afraid of collateral damage maybe reporting of it and gaining negative publicity, but certainly not of inflicting it. One reason that collateral damage figures in Iraq (inflicted by the alliance), were not reported, indeed they lied at the time and said the figures were not even recorded.
..but only the truly depraved like Arafat, Begin, Mother Theresa or the 14th Dalai Lama have a fighting chance of winning it.
Ezekiel 23:20
...over humans.
Here's hoping we eventually get to the point where both sides just deploy robots, and whichever has robots standing at the end wins.
Lets stop wasting young lives.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
People keep going on about the robocaplypse and the "friendly AI problem" but the real problem has, for millenia, been the "friendly NI problem" or friendly natural intelligence problem. Whether the drones being manipulated by the natural intelligences are made of silicon, metal and composites powered by electricity, or they are flesh and blood constructs powered by chemistry is beside the point.
Seastead this.
NPR had a piece that same kinds of arguments have been made against every new escalation of military technology back to metal swords and the gun itself. That technology increases the soldiers killing capacity and makes him/her more removed from man-to-man combat.
The real jump would be machine-decided (A.I.) killing. For the most part there is a man in the decision loop. Even with the new Israeli "Iron Dome" missiles where operator has seconds to decide to launch. (More of a financial decision because they cost $75K apiece.)
I have put a lot of thought into combat robots, particularly airborne ones. I think they're really an inevitable development.
I don't have a problem with robots maneuvering themselves over a battlefield. I don't have a problem with a robot killing someone. I don't even have a problem with giving it a target, and letting it decide the best way to eliminate it.
The only provision I would require is that we not have it select its own targets. There should be a human operator somewhere telling it what it should be shooting at. Or, for some scenarios, a "shoot everything that moves that isn't broadcasting an IFF signal" button, but that would be useful mainly for aircraft or fixed defenses, and should only be used for actual large-scale warfare, not counter-insurgency stuff. I'm talking "there are 200 MiGs over DC, if it isn't USAF, kill it". And *that's* only necessary because I think air warfare is going to become a numbers game, with hundreds or thousands of cheap (~$10,000) drones forming a "swarm", so a pure "drone pilot/human gunner" solution just won't work. Land robots are intrinsically more complex - both the human-like designs and the tank-like designs (the only two worth a damn IMO) are by their nature expensive, so the numbers will be small enough for "drone pilot/human gunner" to work.
This led to clever people developing submachine guns.
Give it a couple decades and you'll be able to download plans for your own battlebot and then create it on your printer
Not true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_shotgun
"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Sounds like the perfect fucking soldier to me.
You don't fight wars except for one reason - to win. To win, you have to kill the enemy. To kill the enemy, you need efficient soldiers who are committed to the mission.
Robots are also absent of malice which unfortunately is not the case on the human battlefield.
Hello? Anyone home? It was still Hitler who attacked the Soviet Union in first place. Way to go, blaming the victim.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Believe it or not, philosophically-minded roboticists and robotically-minded philosophers are on this.
May I suggest, for example, this book from MIT Press?
The drones are already in the air. Do we really need robots when it's just easier to kill from the air?
And if the drones are too pin-point, there are still enough nukes out there to take out huge portions of population if that is the need.
It's all going to be death by air, drone, ICBM or bunker buster.
Bryan
Stop these robots from fingering my wife!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Chief Communist Party historian called from the 50's: your version of history is approved. Congratulations, comrade! However, if you are not afraid of spending the rest of your days at Gulag, check out some common knowledge
yo I was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.. I didn't make the second cut though.
Just another second banana
Surely we can't deprive future battlefields of these wondrous autonomous machines! Oh, the humanity! No, wait ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(tank)
http://www.whkeith.com/graphics/bolo-mark-xx.jpg
but what if you're the bad guy? strength doesn't make you right.
Just another second banana
I wonder how many college kids will feel like this once they learn that their autonomous vehicle designs used in the DARPA competitions have been used in this manner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26YLehuMydo
Just put all wars on the moon, make sure all sides have robots (and the Pentagon will he happy to sell them to you if you don't have access to your own.) Then let them have at it. No more dead soldiers, no more collateral damage, looser picks up brewskies after the fight. A new era of world peace ensues.
So they want to ban robots from wars, so that only real people die in the battlefield? What's the "game theory" behind a robot-only war? Whatever it is, it has to be better than sending 18 year old kids to fight.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Maybe you should read it yourself. I mean, it is all there in the text:
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You make some great points I agree with about cruise missiles and indoctrination ("brainwashing") already being around for a long time in warfare. I agree we need to think more deeply about this, and your proposal is a start in that direction. One issue with your suggestion is that these days even invading a country like Iraq that posed the US no immediate danger was labelled "defensive". The best of ideas can just get spun around when core values are lost. That has given us "free speech zones" that are literally cages miles from any events. And it has given us "border zones" that extend 100 miles inland and cover 75% of the population where citizens rights are essentially suspendable whenever desired by law enforcement calling in the border patrol. Thus, your suggestion might never be invoked because leaders would just label any war of aggression as "defensive" -- and who is to stop them?
You might like two related links. The first about something written by Marine Major General Smedley Butler in the 1930s called "War is a Racket", where he concludes only by taking the profit-motive out of warfare can it be ended:
http://www.warisaracket.com/
The second is by me, and is the product of more than a quarter century of thinking about this issue since I spent about a year as a visitor/volunteer to two heavily-military-funded CMU robotics labs: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
I signed the petition anyway (and included a link to my essay in the "sincerely" closing line which was the only part of the letter that was editable besides my name). But I feel that only by addressing the issues Butler raises and I raise and you raise will we all move towards a real long-term solution on this for humanity (and AIs) as a whole.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
When they're not demanding a new Holocaust they're screaming at the people calling them on it
I'm no fan of Kissinger, but I'd like to know: which army did he command?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Well, let's make sure these Robot Protesters' families are first in line for a military draft. And make sure they talk to the widows, parentless children and amputees from the past wars and ask their opinion on it.
I wouldn't mind robots on the battlefield as long as no humans were on the battlefield. If all wars end up being fought between robots, and no humans / animals involved etc, then I'm all for robots being on the battlefield. However, the cynic in me thinks once they get on the battlefield, they'll end up in the city streets and elsewhere that humans congregate.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Hello? Anyone home? It was still Hitler who attacked the Soviet Union in first place.
In the first place, Germany invaded Poland, and it happened after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which arguably is the official start of WWII.
Way to go, blaming the victim.
According to the pact, Stalin was planning to annex his part of Eastern Europe, and already started (and lost) war with Finland. Not exactly "a victim", is he? Also, as GGP mentioned he systematically executed Red Army officers, so when USSR was finally invaded, Red Army had literally only a mob with pitchforks and shovels to defend themselves.
Well, no. In the first place, the USSR tried to negotiate with France and Britain, but the negotiations bogged down and Hitler made a better offer, basically agreeing that the USSR can get back the territories it has lost in 1917 (the Baltic states) and in the 1919-1921 (when Poland invaded the USSR, taking a large chunk of Ukraine and Belarus).
Then Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and Poland happily took a part in it, only to be steamrolled by the Wehrmacht shortly after.
The Winter War was basically Stalin trying to get a better strategic position to fight Hitler. And yes, there the USSR was the aggressor. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, there USSR was a victim. An asshole victim, sure, but in the second war, many victims were asshole victims - Poland first and foremost, but also Britain and France. They set the stage WW2 20 years before.
Literally, yes? What about the KV tank? That was literally neither a pitchfork nor a shovel. And what does executing officers have to do with being a victim or not? That particular idiocy is a complete different topic altogether.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
See Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman for the natural conclusion of drone development.
See the Black Magic M-66 anime movie for the natural conclusion of purely robotic kill bot development. (That anime is one of the closest I've seen to capturing the feeling of Saberhagen's Berserker series (already mentioned in this thread). The Terminator series runs a very distant second place.)
Post revolution (heck post civil war) eras are typically followed by repressions.
And oh, I come from USSR, actually from the part that has very bad relations with Russia and which suffered a lot during repressions (not least, because of the national movement) only Ukraine suffered more.
There were repressions.
There were executions. (3.5 million of them, all official, this statistic wasn't publicly available so there was no reason to make it up)
There were many who died in Gulag and the likes. There was horrible "Golodomor" in Ukraine which is hard to estimate. (that's why estimations vary so much)
But 70 million in a country whose entire population was what, 150-170 million, is not even frucking remotely imaginable.
And comparing USSR's internal repressions to what Hitler did AND CONCLUDING HITLER WAS BETTER is not a matter of opinion, it's pure propaganda bullshit.