I wish there was no reason for stupid warfare, but:
Aren't they better off than the Vietnamese who lived under the fear of Napalm bombardment? (or, for that matter, Japanese fearing the atomic bomb) I don't think that robotics has significant negative impact on warfare (and I wonder whether it has a positive impact).
Yes, in one sense people are better off with drones than they would be with land mines or cluster bombs or "shock and awe" style area-bombing.
Those are (pretty clearly, IMO) war crimes.
But still, it's useful to be worried about the potential "desensitising effect" of remote warfare. Is someone operating a drone subject to the same psychological pressure to avoid killing other humans as someone pulling a trigger? (Turns out that yes, that person probably is, but that their political superiors possibly aren't).
I think war is pretty desensitized, at least in the US, already. The military is so disconnected from the general public that there's no difference— if we hear that X civilians were killed by a drone or that X civilians were killed from a bomb or crossfire or whatever, I would argue that the response is generally the same.
And the people who make decisions don't really seem to care at all about this sort of killing except insofar as it creates backlash or has some other operational implication, which means the mode of killing doesn't really matter.
In terms of their superiors, isn't that how warfare has always been?
My guess would be that ground troops replaced by robots would likely still have a pilot with a "finger on the trigger" for a long time. If the reaction is this mixed Hacker News, how do you think extremely conservative military commanders would feel about "AI" controlled soldiers?
It doesn't help that drone pilots are treated absolutely miserably by the command. I had a friend who transferred from our electronics tech job (which was extremely laid-back and stress-free most of the time) to work in a UAV command, where the command effectively viewed its pilots as machines to work until failure. "Oh, another one attempted suicide because his wife left him? That's cool, tell the monitor that we need an extra body and we'll replace him when the next boot drop hits. In the meantime, just increase everyone else's hours from 14 hours a day to 16 hours a day. We aren't the FAA, we don't have rest requirements."
Incidentally, air traffic control had this same problem in the 90s until too many people started taking the quick way off the tower.
>> Aren't they better off than the Vietnamese who lived under the fear of Napalm bombardment?
Not really, instead they'll live in fear of Robot bombardment. Which is already happening today in (for example) Pakistan with US-directed drone strikes against civilians.
My in-laws are from North Vietnam, and I'd have a few more of them if it weren't for carpet bombing during that war.
I'm not wild about drone strikes but the scale of destruction isn't remotely comparable. I mean, just look at the amount of bombing we carried out in Laos over a similar period, even though we weren't even at war with that country: http://peterslarson.com/2010/12/15/us-bombings-in-laos-1965-...
People who get killed by a drone strike are just as dead, whether they are legitimate military targets or unlucky innocents, and likewise the suffering for people who are injured is just as dismal as from other kinds of attacks. But the scales involved are very different and we shouldn't overlook that.
Aren't they better off than the Vietnamese who lived under the fear of Napalm bombardment? (or, for that matter, Japanese fearing the atomic bomb) I don't think that robotics has significant negative impact on warfare (and I wonder whether it has a positive impact).