
UN delay could open door to robot wars - spking
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/06/autonomous-weapons-un-delay-robot-wars
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atemerev
Robot wars are so much better than human wars. Against humans, robots will
eventually use more non-lethal options (it's easier to be humane if losing a
fight means replacing a drone than when it's either your life or your
enemy's). Then, robots will be mostly used against other robots, reducing
death tolls. Then, perhaps, wars will be decided in friendly Starcraft
matches, saving billions. :)

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mzs
"Maxim was later knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to humanity -- it
was thought that the machine gun would make wars shorter, hence more humane."
Spencer C. Tucker _A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to
the Modern Middle East vol 6 1st ed_ pg 1198

[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-
slaughte...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/maxims-machine-gun-slaughtered-
hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-f9e068f5148)

"Not even the evidence of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, with its long sieges
and trench warfare—an eerie predictor of World War I’s horrors to come—could
persuade military observers of the Maxim gun’s lethality on the modern
battlefield."

~~~
nickff
Artillery caused ~60% of combat deaths and 75% of combat injuries in World War
1. The machine gun is definitely a terrifying weapon, and has the added impact
of being directed at individuals, or aimed at groups, but was simply much less
deadly. I would also add that indirect-fire artillery is much more likely to
cause post traumatic stress disorder (shell-shock), as the randomness and lack
of control is traumatic.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not a wargames expert, but you could argue the _threat_ of the machine gun
kept people in trenches, which of course shaped the war and made artillery a
cornerstone.

Kind of like how the queen in chess may not take many pieces. She is easily
the most powerful piece, and as a result a very credible threat. As a result
she can be used to project threats rather than taking pieces.

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reitanqild
FWIW I recently read "Kill Decision" based on a tip here on HN.

The plotline of the book is about autonomous drones. In my opinion the book
seemed well researched and not too far fetched.

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jonkiddy
That was a terrific book. I highly recommend anything from Daniel Suarez.

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Ao7bei3s
I found it rather dull, and the entire notion of using pheromones to control
multicopters really absurd.

~~~
reitanqild
As noted above I filed it under "not too far fetched". As I grow older and
have spent more time in the it industry less and less stuff files under
impossible.

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x5n1
Robot wars, or drone strikes, have been going on for at least 20 years perhaps
more. And perhaps robots have the ability to even the battlefield. Imagine
China sending billions of drones to counteract American drones. Perhaps we
should be looking forward to drone war, because anyone can destroy your
machines, it's not a big deal for anyone to enter such a war. There will be no
diplomatic incident over destroyed robots as a provocation to all out war
between countries with real power. The battlefield is pretty much open to
anyone with the hardware.

~~~
baconner
It lowers the barrier of entry to use lethal violence and that is not a good
thing. A more realistic scenerio is that rich countries will have less reason
to seek diplomatic solutions now that the only people doing the dying are the
poorer nations they wage war against. Just imagine how many years an all robot
military could occupy a nation with no public blowback because of casualties.
At that point it's a cost calculation.

Just imagine how this might be applied by powers like the US, Russia, Israel,
and China. IMO its a recipe for increased use of force and extended violent
occupations. And that's not even getting into the issue of autonomous kill
decision capabilities.

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mtgx
The biggest danger is the government believing they "solved" autonomous
killing machines that kill people based on the NSA's mass spying apparatus,
when in fact such robots could have many false positives. In fact, they
already do that. It's just a human that pushes the button. When the decision
will become automated, such strikes will grow 10 or 100 fold, just like the
drone strikes increased "air strikes" by 100-1000x fold in the Middle East,
too.

It's simple logic really. When it's easy and cheap, they'll just do a lot more
of it, and with much more relaxed rules, because every single strike is not a
huge deal (to them) anymore, so they can afford to kill "less important"
targets, or even "false positives", because there are a lot more strikes where
that one came from.

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PavlovsCat
> The biggest danger is the government believing they "solved" autonomous
> killing machines that kill people based on the NSA's mass spying apparatus,
> when in fact such robots could have many false positives.

False positives only matter in so far as they can generate outrage that can
threaten power. So if you find a way to make absolutely sure no powerful
person gets killed, which doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve, you can
pretty much start shooting fish in a barrel without any adverse consequences.
E.g. when Mao had his leaders fulfill quotas of persecuting so-called
dissidents, whether those people were really dissidents was rather secondary.
What matters is that there is a certain percentage that is unemployed,
starving, and/or hunted by killer robots; that in itself does wonders to keep
people in line, and the people who aren't directly under attack have a huge
capacity to rationalize and ignore things, if that's what it takes to not be
attacked. If we can accept people needlessly starving we can accept people
being killed by a random number generator no problem.

I wish I was being snarky, and I hope for nothing more than to be proven
wrong, but absent radical changes, that's what I see in our future. "A boot
stamping on a human face, _forever_ " is not a still frame, it's a process,
and unless that process is stopped for good, that human face will become
infinitely thin and infinitely helpless.

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jpt4
Off Topic: I see in your profile, PavlovsCat, a link to the RetroShare
Sourceforge page. Are you a contributor to the project? I see that they now
have an active GitHub repository [0], when I had thought progress had slowed
or ceased.

[0]
[https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare](https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare)

~~~
PavlovsCat
Oh, I kinda forgot about that... to be honest, I have used that thing once,
when it was discussed here, "added" a few people, but it never even came to
really talking to anyone over it. So, thanks for reminding me, I guess I'll
try it again! [
[https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/version-0-6-...](https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/version-0-6-is-
out/) ] (needless to say, I'm not a contributor, and I doubt I could provide
much of substance to something like that)

Are there other ways to be reachable semi-anonymously? I don't care much about
encryption, since the most "dangerous" things I say in public anyway, but I
also don't want to put an email or website address because I've, uhh, learned
to behave better here by getting hellbanned a lot, and as such wouldn't want
to be tied to an identifier like that should that happen again.

Sorry for endulging, I wish HN had a simple private messaging system, maybe
requiring a "message permission request" to be accepted before messaging
someone; even restricting it to few short messages that get deleted after a
while would be great.

~~~
jpt4
For asynchronous anonymous communication, I have been experimenting with Pond
recently [0]. Message have perfect forward security from each previous, are
anonymized through the TOR network, padded to a standard packet length and
sent at randomized times (along a power-scale distribution), to prevent size
and timing co-ordination attacks revealing identity.

The network is client-server architectured, but as befits a replacement for
e-mail one can run one's own server. Everything is open source, written in Go,
and the work of Adam Langley, HTTPS security engineer at Google. The CLI is
also a standard for aesthetically appealing design.

You need to share a symmetric key with every contact to bootstrap trust; feel
free to e-mail me (in my profile) if you would like a first contact.

[0] pond.imperialviolet.org

~~~
jpt4
Edit: Messages* have

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xixi77
IMO it's not obvious that autonomous robots would be worse at things like
discriminating between civilian and military targets than humans --
particularly when said humans are in a life-or-death situation that requires
quick decisions. The way the article describes it, it looks more like an
attempt by the parties currently lacking technology to level the playing field
through diplomatic means, rather than a mutually beneficial arrangement.

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georgeecollins
The biggest threat to automous weapons is the millitary organizations that
want to keep manpower central. That's why drones were pioneered by the CIA and
the Navy and not the US Air Force. They needed solutions, not pilots.

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13thLetter
It's hard not to think that a lot of the theatrical upset about "killer
robots" is because these are weapons mostly deployed by the United States and
a few other Western nations against opponents who don't have a real military
defense against them. When you can't respond with warfare, there's always
lawfare.

(Cynical, perhaps, but if you watch the UN human rights council for even five
minutes cynicism seems quite appropriate.)

