
Keep Killer Robots Science Fiction - robertwiblin
http://autonomousweapons.org/slaughterbots/
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dredmorbius
Technology is about reducing costs. Some costs are best not reduced.

Data, information, and control capabilities are force multipliers. If the goal
is to deliver (or threaten to deliver) deadly force, the greater the acuracy
with which this can be done, the more effective it is.

I was reviewing the German assault on France in World War II recently. What is
interesting is that the forces were fairly evenly matched, and French armour
in particular was superior to German in all but one category: German tanks had
radios.

France distributed its forces against possibly military attack, Germany
concentrated its forces _and dynamically adapted to changing battle conditions
to seek maximum advantage_. In both specific engagements and at the scale of
the entire front, German forces could adapt far faster than the French.
Tactical advantage: Germany.

The rise of guerilla tactics, and their evolution over the second half of the
20th century, and into the 21st, has been telling.

Ambush attacks, soft-target attacks, suicide and car bombs, roadside "IED"
explosives -- lying in wait for some target of opportunity. Over the past few
years, forces in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East have used drones to
drop grenades and shells from modest heights onto targets, almost completely
unobserved. The prospect of far more mobile killing (or cripling) weapons,
guided to specific individual targets, or simply selecting members of a crowd
arbitrarily, could prove, as they say, game-changing.

And the winning move, not playing, is striking me as increasingly unlikely.

 _Of the fundamental and deep principles of economics I find useful, few
strike me as powerful as the Jevons Paradox:_ increased efficiencies at some
task _do not_ reduce the total amount of resources or other factors of
production utilised, or the amount of that activity conducted. _By reducing
costs, increased efficiency increases activity._ Jevons saw this with coal and
steam power. Electricity, railroads, lighting, telephony, printing, radio,
automobiles, air travel, the Internet: these didn't simply make the
previously-experienced level of corresponding activities easier, _they raised
the total amount of the activity, tremendously._

Wading through the product of an 1860s - 1880s boom in publishing on petroleum
and fossil fuel activity, I ran across a statement that the coal deposits of
the United States would suffice for a million years' supply, _at then present
rates of consumption_. I can recall a time when advertisements in _National
Geographic_ , in the 1970s, claimed a thousand year supply. The current
estimates in BP's annual statistical review of energy are for a century or
three.

The amount of coal hasn't changed appreciably. The use of it has.

And falling costs of accessing that coal, and increased use-value from
applying it, has increased rates of consumption roughly 10,000-fold.

Consider the prospects of waging war where offensive casualties, targeting
power, time-to-execute, and single-shot-kill effectiveness see a similar
increase.

The corrolary of the Jevons paradox is counterintuitive: _if you want to see
less of a thing, make it very, very, very expensive._

How does one do that here?

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lawlessone
too late.

