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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.
6m is not the intended distance of deployment. At longer distances it does not blind, but instead causes the headaches, dizziness, and nausea it was designed for. Thus, it is not a blinding weapon but a visual deterrent.
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers?
Yes? Obviously? I mean, a pistol fired right next to the face can blind you as well (or deafen you if fired next to the ear, possibly permanently). That's not banned, because the point of the pistol is to kill people with bullets, not cripple them. In fact, virtually any weapon (and most tools, such as tanks, planes, etc.) can cause all kinds of debilitating damage if used in the wrong way or if someone ends up in the wrong situation, even if they're not designed to do that. Hell, a pair of binoculars can cause permanent blindness if you look at the sun through them. Can cause blindness isn't a good reason to ban anything.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
There was an episode of ST:TOS on this point. Two planets had warring factions and they had managed to reduce it to basically a computer program that simulated attacks and decided who was killed by them. Those people were then supposed to show up to a center to be exterminated. The problem of course was that since there weren't all the hardships of war... famine, disease, destruction etc... it had gone on for ages. Kirk's solution of course was to destroy the computer so they'd either have to fight the old fashioned messy way or actually settle their differences.
Like many of those episodes I think it really did touch on the realities of the human mind. If war becomes too detached, too clean and simple then we will put much less effort into diplomacy. I'm not a pacifist, but I do think war should be a last option. And it should be messy and painful so that we'll try to find ways to end it.