Ethics of robots/drones/unmanned machines use in war

[Churchill]

I'm not arguing that drones aren't what anyone claims that they are; they are a very clear and present psychological terror to certain areas of the world. This is further hyped up by their local stone age Mullah's and village elders, taking their marching orders from Taliban, Haqqani, or Pakistani Taliban leadership. Does the intel get fucked up? Sure it does. Do people make mistakes? Sure they do. You can argue the right/wrong of that or whether they should be punished more harshly, I don't particularly care one way or the other.

To argue it is the drones fault people are scared, or the drones fault people are being killed mistakenly, it's just not factual. There are so many other factors at play with both of those thought processes. I gave one for the former, regarding the latter, it is very uncommon for intel to be driven by drones. You don't fly around and look for muji activity and blow it up, it's a waste of time. Most stuff is extremely precise and meticulously developed before it even goes to following dirka 1 or dirka 2 around.

My other point, which I've made before, but when some random Mohammad village elder claims 74 people were murdered in his village and you believe it, you are awful. You are forming non-facts to fit an ideology. Most Afghan's prefer Taliban rule, especially in villages away from major population centers. The warlords kept power, the village elders had chai boys, things were good. It doesn't matter though, because village elder dirka 1 could hate the Taliban and he'd say the same damn thing, true or false, because if he doesn't love them (the Taliban) he is sure as fuck afraid of them. If you can't understand news is reported in this way to form your opinion for you, or if you can't recognize that it is when the news agrees with your own ideology, then that is bad.

Also, that report you linked isn't exactly new.

[Ashmada]

I'd got no idea what an Alex Jones, DS or CB is. Sure is quite tinfoil-hatty in here.

[Rhinox]

Quick someone link the Colbert report segment on what the United States considers an enemy combatant.

Lazy assholes here

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col...with-one-drone

[Cantih]

Easy ones first

Should robots eventually be able to make autonomous decisions when it comes to life and death of humans on the battlefield?

NOPE. The furthest it should ever go is in identification and acquisition of target, a human should ALWAYS be responsible for a final fire order. The only AI controlled weapons release should be for defense, like anti-missile capability.

Though, there is going to be a thing about this eventually. You'll get someone taking one of those paintball sentry turrets (really, youtube the things, they're scary fast and accurate), but attaching a real gun to it, maybe even mounting it to something like a Big Dog. This will tie in to a point later.

Who should be accountable when mistakes happen?

In the absence of autonomous fire, it should lie with who gives the command to fire. If software is primarily responsible for acquisition, the fire caller should be able to judge the quality of that acquisition. If acquisition software is erroneous, it shouldn't be used, and/or improved until it isn't erroneous. (This is a lot of shoulds, wills are still up to people. Reality probably won't match the ideal.)

Do you support the use of robotics in military?

People don't want to die, telepresence allows a combatant to fight and not die. Support doesn't matter, as long as there are people who don't want to die but still require to resort to force, this line of development will continue.

And, now that we've reached this point, the previous questions don't matter. The effective counter tactic to telepresence becomes to cut the link to command and control. The obvious counter tactic to that is... to give the robotic entity autonomous capability. So, should or shouldn't, doesn't matter. It's a matter of who and when.

Now, this is where things get harder, and actually requires the discussion to turn away from drones.

Do you think that they will lower the political cost of war so much that there'll be no deterrent to war?

In my mind, the primary deterrent to war is disparity of capability, or "Can I take them?". Unmanned and autonomous machines don't really alter our degree of capability (in that, they change HOW we do it, but not WHAT we do.), so I wouldn't expect that much of a change from the current era. (The second deterrent is "Can I get away with it?", I indirectly address this later.)

Outside of missile combat, from a military standpoint, the US is basically inviolate. No country is capable of putting boots on the ground or birds in the air here to effect force. We, on the other hand, are quite capable of wrecking the shit of any non-nuclear power on the planet, and completely removing their capability of ever being a military threat to us. We could break any base, stockpile, factory, or infrastructure required, with minimal threat to ourselves.

But this only really deters war against the US (or similar), against not so capable targets, well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...tury_conflicts

Also, while we can remove an entity's capability to use military force, it does bugger all to remove their desire to use it.

This leads to...

We've seen things like the change of definition of "combatant" to include most civilians, in order to cover up the number of civilian deaths due to drone strikes.
...
Right now, the international laws regarding them is undetermined, and the US military has made quite an extensive use of these.

No state is capable of pursuing war against the US (or any other country that severely outmatches it's capability).

What we're seeing now, is non-state actors, using any effective conventional and non-conventional means available to them, to effect force. And, they don't particularly care about the Geneva Conventions either. (This is where a dude sticking a sentry gun on a Big Dog comes in. It is entirely possible, right NOW, to hack together the autonomous kill capable robot you're concerned about the ethics of, and unleash them. Possibly even in the thousands strong force range. "But it has no effective FoF capability!" Remember, the dudes you need to worry about, DON'T CARE!)

They aren't a country, they aren't really a military, they aren't really civilians, and they aren't pursuing war as we historically/legally consider it. As such neither criminal nor military methods are particularly suited to effectively handling the problem. And unfortunately so far, all the obvious solutions we've attempted have significant human rights and freedoms costs. They aren't a real solution, the best solution, or even a good solution. Just an easy one.
(So, while the manipulations of who is a combatant has been used to cover up numbers, saying that's the reason why, is a little disingenuous.)

What are your thoughts about the ethics of using more and more robotics for the purpose of war?

So, in the end, most of that question doesn't really matter, as always, what it really boils down to is.
"ethics of ... war?"

It's not a weapon problem.
It's a people problem.

[Mrbeansman]

Lazy assholes here

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col...with-one-drone

To be fair navigating Colbert's site is a nightmare compared to Stewart's.

[Tyrath]

To be fair navigating Colbert's site is a nightmare compared to Stewart's.

..? Format seems identical to me

[Cantih]

Sorry for the necro, but as I said a couple months ago, civilian capability is going to leave international and military ethics in the dust.
http://boingboing.net/2012/12/12/man...th-paintb.html

[Day]

I always side with Church on military discussions. He is always right. Rest of you are getting info from reddit headlines or some shit.

[notorious bum]

Except when you have credible reporters, like Jeremy Scahill, actually visiting locations to report whole villages being leveled with no known terrorist leaders ever being there, yeah, that's some shitty made-up intel. The fact that the new law is "guilty until proven innocent, while you're dead" makes this entire era of American imperialism go beyond the standard gunboat diplomacy.

I prefer the classic empire tactics of just arming the dictators to do our dirty work, now the middle east is just a sloppy game of Elmer Fudd firing shots in the dark and calling it a war.

This was an interesting story:

A tweeted tale of drone strikes
One Twitter user offers a short history of U.S. drone attacks, which looks endless across social media

Web designer and NYU graduate student Josh Begley took to Twitter today to offer a short history of U.S. drone strikes since 2002. With one tweet dedicated to each (reported) strike, Begley’s @dronestream feed seems to show an endless stream of missiles primarily raining down on Pakistan. At the time of writing, Begley has been tweeting for five hours and has only listed reported strikes up to early 2010. Here are just a handful from the feed:

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/11/a_tw...drone_strikes/

I'm guessing this guy went to twitter jail about 10 times, even for only reporting a mere fraction of the actual numbers.

[Hatedregret]

Actually looked up the sentry guns..... scary shit when a kid and a laptop can make death rain down with an automaton.

[ronin sparthos]

Seems ideal for home defense.

[kuronosan]

Do you support the use of robotics in military?

Why send people to die if a strike can handle the same work?

Do you think that they will lower the political cost of war so much that there'll be no deterrent to war?

No? People are still dying. Just because soldiers aren't the ones dying doesn't mean civilians get to live.

Should robots eventually be able to make autonomous decisions when it comes to life and death of humans on the battlefield?

Of course not. Something as complex as deciding who lives or dies should not be left up to 0s and 1s. Logic is not reason. Computers use logic. Humans use reason.

Who should be accountable when mistakes happen?

The person who was controlling it, come on now.

[Churchill]

The person controlling it just does what someone else says and the people in charge aren't going to be held accountable.

eg, that's a very dangerous position to take.

[Rhyis.]

The person controlling it just does what someone else says and the people in charge aren't going to be held accountable.

eg, that's a very dangerous position to take.

How's it any different if soldiers were pulling the trigger?

[Churchill]

Because a soldier doesn't ask permission to fire.

[Rhyis.]

A fighter pilot does.

[Churchill]

So then you understand why a soldier can be held accountable for a decision to fire and a team of people operating a drone that fires on the orders of someone unrelated to their operation and management of the drone should not.

[Rhyis.]

Well no, I don't. The exact same process is happening on both sides. The drone team is simply playing the part of the soldier. They're the instrument of death. They're the ones pulling the trigger. They know as little of the operation as the soldier does. They're just there to follow orders.

[kuronosan]

The person controlling it just does what someone else says and the people in charge aren't going to be held accountable.

eg, that's a very dangerous position to take.

Who should be held accountable? The person shooting the Romanovs during the Bolshevik Revolution was only following orders. I guess he wasn't responsible?

[Niiro]

Well no, I don't. The exact same process is happening on both sides. The drone team is simply playing the part of the soldier. They're the instrument of death. They're the ones pulling the trigger. They know as little of the operation as the soldier does. They're just there to follow orders.

When you separate a soldier from their target in every meaningful way you remove their ability to use their own judgement in a given situation.

A drone operator can make no distinction from civilian and combatant, all they have a set of coordinates and a confirmation order to fire.

No? People are still dying. Just because soldiers aren't the ones dying doesn't mean civilians get to live.

It absolutely lowers the political cost of war. Having a "troops on the ground" presence is very, very different from quietly blowing up a building at 2 am from half a world away with no trace of who did it, how, and why. The bomb doesn't come equipped with fireworks that make an American flag on detonation.