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Only Twice Have Nations Banned a Weapon Before It Was Used; They May Do It Again
Lasrick writes: Seth Baum reports on international efforts to ban 'killer robots' before they are used. China, Israel, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States are apparently developing precursor technology. "Fully autonomous weapons are not unambiguously bad. They can reduce burdens on soldiers. Already, military robots are saving many service members' lives, for example by neutralizing improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq. The more capabilities military robots have, the more they can keep soldiers from harm. They may also be able to complete missions that soldiers and non-autonomous weapons cannot." But Baum, who founded the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, goes on to outline the potential downsides, and there are quite a few.
To welcome our new Killer Robot overlords.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
When you are able to keep hackers from defacing your national websites.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"In 1868, the Great Powers agreed under the Saint Petersburg Declaration to ban exploding bullets, which by spreading metal fragments inside a victim’s body could cause more suffering than the regular kind. And the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons now has 104 signatories, who have agreed to ban the weapons on the grounds that they could cause excessive suffering to soldiers in the form of permanent blindness."
Enjoy :)
...You have 20 seconds to comply.
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
Blinding weapons are banned? Not so.
From that article:
[...] a soldier he interviewed after an incident in Iraq a few years ago. While on duty, the soldier fumbled a dazzler he was trying to point at an oncoming vehicle a safe distance away. “He was in an awkward position and illuminated a rearview mirror in such a way that he got a beam directly back into the eye.” The beam had gone less than 6 metres when it hit the soldier in the centre of vision of his right eye, burning the retina and leaving his vision in that eye permanently damaged.
Yeah, right. Blinding lasers are banned from military use, except that the military uses them and (from the article) are being made available to police departments.
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers? Is the ban only for *combat* soldiers and not policing soldiers? Is it only banned in *declared wars*, and not *non-war military invasions*?
Can anyone explain why we use dazzlers when they appear to be on the banned list?
"Fully autonomous weapons are not unambiguously bad. They can reduce burdens on soldiers."
I don't want the burdens on soldiers to be reduced. I want killing to be as hard on people as possible, so they think before they do it.
And they kill thousands of innocent non-combatants every year, and have been banned by most civilized nations--not including the US of A, sadly. So if your point is that land mines demonstrate what a horrible idea autonomous killer robots is, I agree.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Remember that? That was the 1928 pact that outlawed war.
You might remember how well that worked out.
This will work out just swell until Russia or China or ISIS develop an effective fighting robot and are able to deploy them in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference in battle.
Plus there's the impossibility of enforcement. How can you prove it was a robot rather than a remote-operated drone?
And there's the tiny issue that, knowing how slowly the wheels of the "international community's" court systems turn, the war is likely to be won or lost before those violating it ever come to trial...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Just saying.... you are going to have to pry my auto-turret from my cold dead fingers.
Expanding bullets cause a larger wound channel but retain 95% to 99%+ of their mass. Fragmenting bullets shatter and keep traveling in all directions (typically smaller bullets with higher velocity). Both are more deadly than standard non-deforming military bullets (designed for more reliable feeding in machine guns). Personally I never use fragmenting bullets for hunting because I don't want to bite down on a piece of lead in a steak.
Robots that kill the enemy will "save lives' and keep soldiers from harm.
Is this going to be part of the new Slashdot too?
Scorta futuere amo!
Is it because if killer robots can deliver a lower collateral damage rate than humans, it will be a job killer?
They've saved far more lives than they've taken.
Citation needed. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people are killed each year by landmines. What you really mean is that you don't live with them in your community, and are therefore unconcerned by the impact of these killing devices. And now you think autonomous, mobile killing machines is a *good* idea. If you live in the USA, then it might pay to do some research in the militarisation of your police forces - and then think about whether you really want these kinds of things being built by the military-industrial complex.
It's good luck to be superstitious
There's no better comment that succinctly states why fully autonomous killer robots are a bad idea.
Another great example is the first eight minutes of the 2014 version of Robocop. Satire at its best, and Samuel L. Jackson doesn't disappoint. (Ignore the rest of the movie...it was terrible. But the first eight minutes were absolutely brilliant. Honestly. Rent the movie, watch the first eight minutes, and then just skip the rest.) He begins the movie with the following: "What if I told you that even the worst neighborhood in America could be made completely safe. And what if I told you that this could be accomplished without risking the life of one single law enforcement officer. How do I know this? Because it's happening right now in every country in the world but this one." And then we're taken to the streets of Iran, where fully autonomous robots patrol the streets. Honestly, it's absolutely brilliant.
From what I recall, the US uses landmines with electronic triggers, and are designed to automatically self-destruct or self-deactivate at a preset future time or by electronic signals. These mines use internal batteries and require active electronic triggering, and are designed with fixed battery lifetimes as a failsafe in the event of some electronic failure.
The reason we haven't stopped using them is because they're a very effective deterrent when faced in a defensive position against a numerically superior foe. That describes many of our positions across the world, like in South Korea. Remember, that war never actually ended, and NK verbally threatens to flatten South Korean cities on a pretty regular basis. This is likely one of the primary reasons we didn't ratify that treaty. A good case can be made that we should no longer be defending South Korea or many other regions around the world, but US troops are still there right now, and they need to be able to protect themselves.
Smarter weapons systems can actually save innocent lives - a lesson that many people seem to miss. We used to wage war rather indiscriminately, burning entire cities to the ground, or nuking them into oblivion. Nowadays, we'd just cruise missiles in, or drop deep penetrating ordinance to decapitate the leadership, or target critical war assets much more precisely. Autonomous weapons systems are the natural progression of this trend, and if anything, will probably be used mostly for peacekeeping missions.
It would be nice if banning weapons systems would prevent armed conflicts, but I think the real key to preventing wars and armed conflict is continued diplomacy and improved economic development throughout the world. Happy and well-fed democratic countries generally don't start wars. The "killer robots" are for when things don't work out as well as we'd hoped, and generally speaking, it's unlikely that the military would ever allow them to pull the trigger on their own anyhow.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Missile defence systems normally have a fully autunomous setting.
The machine is trusted not to shoot down airlines.
I can name three countries that would not exist today without land mines;
1. South Korea
2. Taiwan
3. Israel
Used properly as by these three countries land mines are an equalizer. Used improperly as in South East Asia and Africa they are a menace.
Mining beaches is a great way to deter invasion. Up until 2013 Kinmen and Matsu Islands were heavily mined to deter invasion by China. An invasion of the main island could not take place without neutralizing those islands first. Taiwan has removed those land mines but has not destroyed their stockpile. They can still be deployed if China looks like they will invade.
I find it sad that the people who want to ban land mines will not guarantee the sovereignty of the countries that need them to exist.
really?
1. so you think the massive amount of troops and equipment along the border today with international support isn't stopping NK. But mines in the ground that will kill a few thousand troops from a country that doesn't give a shit about people will stop them or act as even a minor deterent? are you retarded?
2. again the quarter million standing army and the international backlash that china would face is what stops china. China is a well equipped army with everything from mine sweepers, a massive army and again a government that has shown somewhat indifference to human life and you reckon it is the land mines that is stopping them?
3. Israel is backed by billions of dollars of state of the art military equipment 200k active personnel and half a million reservists as well as many of the worlds largest militaries behind it and still you reckon it is land mines that is why they survive.
Yes, the US is well behaved, as far as these things go, mapping the mines, making them auto-deactivate and detectable. But the problem is, the US is seen as a beacon of morality. Maybe less so than it used to be, but the rest of the world still has fairly high expectations. If the US is using landmines, other countries can us this as a moral justification to do the same.
The US doesn't need to use them in Korea. They can cede responsibilities for those to South Korea. Pointing to what South Korea does is a far less compelling moral argument.
However, on the matter of Korea, the proposed alternative is autonomous guns. Unlike mines, these things don't hide, so, at the very least, we know if all of them are accounted for. But these could be banned by an overly broad anti-robot rule.
The preferred goal of a weapon of war is to wound. A dead enemy soldier just gets left there on the ground. A wounded soldier diverts combat personnel to drag/evac him back from the front lines, then ties up medical staff and incurs care and treatment costs. So a wounded enemy costs the enemy more resources, and is a much more preferable result than a dead enemy not just from a humanitarian perspective, but from a strategic perspective. That's part of the reason why NATO moved to the smaller 5.62mm bullets - being able to kill an enemy with a single shot wasn't one of the primary selection criteria.
So it becomes a balancing act between wounding enough (on average) to incapacitate the enemy to remove him from the immediate battlefield and tie up enemy resources in the short-term, but not wounding enough to severely incapacitate him for the remainder of his life. i.e. Long after the war is over and the previously-enemy combatants now fall under the jurisdiction and care of the victor in the war. Even if the victor uses the vanquished as slaves, capable slaves are preferable to crippled ones.
Exploding bullets makes it nearly impossible to remove all fragments from the body. Shrapnel and frag grenades in contrast fragment before entering in the body, and each piece that embeds in the body tends to have a clear entry wound making it easier to locate and extract. So exploding bullets have a much greater negative impact on wounded soldiers long after the war is over. Likewise, blindness lasts long after the war is over. And land mines continue to explode long after the war is over. That's what it means by "could cause more suffering than the regular kind."
1.Compare North Korea to South Korea and you will see that including reserves North Korea out matches South Korea. The US has about 29k troops there. That is meaningless if the North decides to attack.
2. It is not the only thing but it may be a deciding factor.
3. Combining Egypt and Jordan they have 539Ktroops. Part of that billions in armaments is landmines. The US may come to help but it would take time. I doubt any other country would come. They have never in the past. Even the US have never had boots on the ground in Israel in an invasion of Israel.
You have no idea what mines do or how they work. Their job is not to kill but to slow the enemy down and funnel them into killing areas where other assets like artillery does the killing.
As for international backlash. it sure has worked well for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. Backlash is only important if it has teeth and no one wants to stand up for other countries.
What's the point of having war if it isn't hell.
like, eg., Predator drones?
The move from that to autonomy is mostly software...
The Phalanx system on US navy ships is, once activated, pretty much automatic. Anything within it's radar envelope automatically gets a dose of 20mm cannon fire. It's designed to take down anti-ship missiles, but will engage pretty much anything moving towards the boat that it's radar can pick up.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What is the difference between Robot vs Self Guided missiles?
Personally I think we should be more concerned with nuclear armed Tomahawk than, for example South Korea's autonomous sentry robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The group that's complaining doesn't realize that we've deployed "killer robots" for a century now - they're called mines and especially naval mines. They may not be your traditional humanoid Robbie the Robot with a gun, but they are fully autonomous, capable of selecting targets on their own, and definitely capable of killing people. Many of the arguments they make in the article are bogus anyway. If you took the text and substituted "people" for "robot" it would read just as well and make just as much sense. The authors act like people don't routinely mess up, make bad decisions, follow charismatic, insane evil overlords, or do generally nasty things to each other for very little reason all the time.
You, ah, you frequently hunt cattle? I guess it's easier to find them than deer.