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What do you think of robots in the military?
Do you think it is ethical?
Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?
Who do you think should be held responsible if a robot accidentally commits a war crime?
Do you think war would be more frequent if there were no humans fighting?
Also a more general question: what do you think is the future of robots?
Very little about war is ethical. Sometimes people refer to it as a “moral solvent” because things that are absolutely unethical in peacetime sometimes become necessary to avoid defeat. This can justify all sorts of horrible things in self-defense. Killing enemy soldiers is only the beginning.
In Ukraine, there is a drone arms race. I believe that usually they kill people by remote control, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they started killing people automatically.
And there will be more robots:
Robot wars: Ukraine now adding ‘land drones’ to its futuristic arsenal
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As a trend, this is scary as hell. What happens in Ukraine won’t stay in Ukraine. But who am I to say that the Ukrainians are wrong to defend themselves this way?
It doesn’t seem likely that there will be international agreements about a new kind of war crime concerning robots.
And certainly, there will be no complaints about robots taking soldiers’ jobs. The more soldiers they can replace, the better.
I'm not for autonomous weapons, but they don't seem quite as bad as mines which are already used. A mine determines you are an enemy combatant worthy of death for solely having stepped on some small patch of ground. That means a Russian soldier, a deer, or a child playing in the woods 150 years from now.
This seems similar to the trend with bombs and missiles. For the US at least, they are now so accurate that mistakes seem to be due to a failure in intelligence where they chose the wrong target?
In Iran the most notorious targeting failure was bombing a school. I haven’t heard of other failures like that. Perhaps with better intelligence, such mistakes will become less common.
Also consider the times when civilians are killed at a checkpoint because soldiers cannot allow them to get too close, and they don’t stop. Perhaps an automated checkpoint would make different decisions, since self-defense isn’t as important? If a checkpoint gets blown up, they will simply replace it.
I don’t think this adds up to war being less horrific, but it means that the horror is curiously selective. Not being seen as a military target becomes all-important.
Meanwhile, the front line between Ukrainian and Russian troops has become a no-man’s land many miles wide where troops can move only by stealth. Much like minefields, automatic weapons are used to attempt to deny access.
This is just not true. They are wildly more accurate than they were in the 80s, but every time you launch a weapon and tell it to hit a target miles and miles away there's all sorts of things that can send you off target, from feet to miles.
And that's for the cases where they use those kinds of weapons. War is an economic battle as much as it is a violent one. Using a 100m missile when a 4k rocket will do causes you problems, and so while we do have precise ordinance, it's not the majority of use.
Mines are also banned by most countries.
Most countries aren't actively being invaded. A lot of these bans are a mixture of feelgood things that will evaporate the moment there's a legit use mixed with global acknowledgement/education that "this tool is seldom the right one and comes with horrific downsides".
But they are extensively used in Ukraine.
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Not part of the treaty: USA, Russia, China, India.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the European land border with Russia collectively suspended their participation or left. Which, by the way, Switzerland complained to the UN about Ukraine's suspension. Which... come one, why does it always have to be Switzerland?
It's a feelgood treaty. Much like any international humanitarian law on war, if any of the countries actually thought they'd benefit from mines, they wouldn't be in it. It's also only anti-personnel mines - which to be fair covers the worst humanitarian excesses.
My understanding is we are basically there now. On board targeting for loitering munitions is in use today.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjp0n7rn41o
I'm curious where the robotics arms race plateaus. It's hard for me to imagine.
On one hand, fewer deaths of soldiers is a good thing, however I think the mechanisation of war does more harm in the long run because it dehumanises the conflict.
It's a lot easier to distance yourself from the death and destruction you're unleashing if you direct it through a screen. It's morbid, but sending soldiers home in body bags is a constant reminder to the public and to leadership of the consequences of war, which is a strong deterrent to continue fighting. Mechanisation turns it into a bizarre economic battle of who can build drones fastest and how much damage your infrastructure can sustain before you collapse.
In my opinion, it's already a failing that the people in charge of starting a war are so emotionally distant from it's consequences. Would we have fewer wars if our presidents/prime ministers family actually had to pick up a gun and risk their lives? I think so.
I can also see it empowering an authoritarian regime to suppress it's people for that same reason. What can the public do if a corrupt leader subjugates their own people using drones?
So no, I don't think it's ethical, but as @skybrian says, very little about war is ethical. Should drones act autonomously? I think it should always be clear who is accountable and what the consequences are for errors. When that is unclear, it's a sign we should stop doing it until/unless it gets resolved.
I believe this is a wider issue we have not been taking as seriously as we should, like when police facial recognition flags an innocent person, or an LLM leading someone to psychosis.
I don’t think so. It use to be commonplace in the 1900s for military experience to be a de facto requirement for political success. Just look at Teddy Roosevelt - and look at how he’s a psychopath that once stated that “war is better than a boring peace”.
And it should not surprise you that this is the guy who engineered the Spanish-America war so he can play cowboy, which he enjoyed greatly, at the cost of many Cuban and later Philippine lives.
Encouraging statesmen to have military color will only select-select our politicians to be psychopathic military people.
There are people that love war, that love killing, that abhor peace. It is not true that everyone hates being a soldier. Are these the people you want in office?
I'm not encouraging us to blindly elect representatives just because they have military training, I'm questioning what life experiences may be indicative when voting for someone. There are some people who enjoy the destruction of war, yes, but also those who have come away from it seeking a more peaceful life.
I want to point out that politicians do often have military backgrounds, for example George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter all had military service. Having the civilian leadership separated from military leadership if anything is a new innovation; the ancient custom was for high-ranking military commanders to be powerful politically as well.
It used to be an unwritten requirement for someone who wanted to be elected president to have served. They’re in charge of the military, someone without that experience would’ve been shamed out of the running.
Worth noting that only H.W. and Carter did any actual military service. The former having been in an actual war and the latter an accomplished, if not war experienced, submariner.
Reagan was a pencil pusher and W got his daddy to get him a cushy job flying planes that were removed from service so he didn't have to leave the US and got to do so despite being an utter shit pilot.
This reminds me of the Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon
In the episode, there’s a virtual war that never ends. People are computed to be casualties and they walk into disintegration booths.
Captain Kirk breaks the simulation computer to force people to deal with the messiness of real war.
My point is that robot war is a step on the way to virtual war and it also might just go on for years and years without resolution because the cost isn’t measured properly.
Already the Ukraine war has gone on a lot longer due the the robots, as everyone has noticed. It seems better in this case but long term…
Someone already gave you the "i love war" example, but there's also the inverse.
You think a country sharing a border with Russia wants their leader saying "nah i'm good" because they don't want to risk their own neck at the cost of everyone else?
It's also just as bad if the leader goes "yeehaw" and decides to fight on the frontlines when Russia invades. Can you imagine how Ukraine would have fared if Zelensky got shot in the face by a Russian sniper on day 1 of the war?
Probably a lot worse than letting him lead from safety!
This was actually a huge problem for the Ancient Greeks, especially Athenians. Their leaders DID have to charge in with their army, usually at the front, for morale reasons. Athens was special because it was a democracy, and every member of the Athenian army was a wealthy citizen who directly voted for their generals. A general who didn't lead by example would get deserted and/or booted quite quickly, in contrast to dictators and kings of other greek and non-greek states near them.
They did not tend to last very long, which means they consistently had a issue with inexperienced generals.
As and American, I think we've pretty thoroughly proven we cannot act responsibly with the military resources we currently have, and the only movement I want to see on that front is a massive scaling back of military spending until we figure out how to get our shit together.
It’s so ironic that a country with entire oceans on each side, and only two bordering countries that are of no threat, needs such a massive military budget. People will often say we need to have good defense capabilities even if we’re scaling back on spending. The Nazis couldn’t invade England through a 10 mile strait! Why are we worried about defense with 3000 miles of ocean to our east and west?
Actually looking for discussion or just rhetorical?
Please discuss. To clarify, I think we need something. Nuclear deterrents, air defense, plenty of stuff I’m ignorant of. But not anything close to what we have.
Cool! It's a topic that is both complicated (in terms of background) and simple.
To your point, the US is functionally uninvadable. Look at how Russia has struggled against Ukraine - with which it shares a massive land border of mostly flat farmland - and then imagine them trying to invade the United States, thousands of miles away and with an ocean in between. It's a silly idea.
So the US's defense expenditure all (and only) sort of makes sense if you zoom out a little bit and realize that the US has assumed responsibility for the security of almost the entire world. See this article talking about how the US protects maritime trade routes, for instance. Similarly, the US doesn't have military bases in Europe to protect the US, it has bases there to protect Europe. Ditto with South Korea, the gulf, parts of Africa, etc. Some of this has changed under Trump obviously, but much more hasn't.
Why do this? I think there's a strong moral case that even with... everything, the world is safer and richer with the US dominant than if it was a free for all, but even if you take a pretty nationalist view of defense, the US's obligations also benefit it strategically. The US has intentionally promoted the dominance of the dollar in international trade, first with Bretton Woods after WWII and then with the petrodollar. And if almost all international trade is happening in dollars, which benefits the US, it thus also benefits the US to protect that trade. So they end up securing basically the entire world.
Ironically there's a pretty strong argument that an isolationist US would have been better off (North and South America together have basically all necessary resources, arable land, etc), but again the world almost certainly would've been worse off and there's no going back easily, so here we are.
It's a hypercomplex topic with a ton of academic literature surrounding, but the tl;Dr is that the US doesn't need to spend basically anything to defend the Continental states themselves, but that's not the point of the US's defense strategy.
I would personally prefer a US that’s more focused on itself. How much of the status quo is about enriching a few people vs. the rest of us? On one hand we have lower inflation than most countries most of the time. On the other hand, if we were putting hundreds of billions of extra funds into social programs I might not care as much about inflation.
Practically, the reason why the USA has bases all over the world is defense, in the sense that we're closer to anyone who wants to hit us than they are to us. As you say, there's thousands of miles of sea before the mainland USA can be occupied or attacked in a way beyond sabotage and small strikes (or ICBMs, but let's leave full scale nuclear war off the table, as it seems to be for all powers with declared nuclear war strategic doctrines, which includes all known nuclear powers aside from Israel who benefits from strategic ambiguity regarding when and why they'd nuke their neighbors.) But with local military bases as support and offensive centers of operation, the USA is more capable of immediate response to aggression than any other nation. And that capability in turn means people mostly don't start shit. The groups who do are irregular forces causing destruction in ways unlike the fights the USA would like to have, where they politely declare their presence and stand out in the open so they can be bombed.
But all that aside, the sheer existence of the network of military bases provides significant geopolitical stability and deterrence to anyone who would want to get into an actual war with the USA.
One is that in an age of ICBMs, the range to which you have to defend is much higher. You don't need boots on the ground to do damage. The Cuban missile crisis was an existential moment for the US, but it did not involve US soil.
Second, is that it's to the great economic benefit of the US. Post WW2, the US created a grand series of allies that rely on the US for military protection. This includes some of the largest economies, and some of the most technologically advance, in the world - Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan are just some examples.
The US's position as their "protector" also means the US can shake them down, or in more diplomatic terms, "get good trade deals", the same way a mobster "protects" and "extracts". Just look at how badly Trump has mistreated Germany and Japan, and how both countries still submit to the economic punishment from the US. Trump's fucking it up, but for ages the US has benefited from very good, let's say, "economic relationships" with its allies.
Finally, the reality is that the US is not self sufficient for the population size it has currently. It was oil in the 80s, it's chips now, it's always going to be something.
It's obviously hard to measure, but I would wager the US has garnered far more in value than it has paid in military fees from 1945 to today.
This isn’t unique to the US. No wealthy country in the modern world is self-sufficient. The benefits from trade are too strong to give up.
If they could fight with drones and ensure said drones don't harm civilians, I see no issue. It could even be nice if no one ever died in wars. Even against enemy soldiers, what difference does it make if a human shoots them or a drone, dead is dead. That said, I can't see it happening, people on a screen will not seem real and atrocities will happen. Once the enemy drones are down people will be thrown into the fight as a last resort. In wars, cities are bombed, industries taken out, anything to cripple the enemy and they all come with casualties. Drones would likely just drag all that on, creating really long lasting wars.
The biggest issue though, is once that gate is opened even a small country, with enough money, could theoretically unleash a tidal wave of small drones set to kill anything with a heartbeat. Imagine some terrorist builds a million drones that don't need commands beyond setting them to go to a spot and kill everyone along the way, entire cities could be killed before anything is done and even then who knows how long you'd have murderous robots on the loose. Each drone could have an AI with a prompt that reads something like "You are a rogue robot in a horror video game cautiously, but swiftly murdered all [players] between these coordinates, sometimes connecting with your fellow rogue robots to accomplish this efficiently, going into hiding to shake off resistance only to reappear when their guard is down".
I know it wouldnt actually work out this way, but a world where nations just make automated/remote controlled robot armies to fight each other in unpopulated areas whenever there is a conflict sounds rad. Like BattleBots but military grade and huge.
I agree with /r/skybrian o war and ethics.
This is a more complicated question than it seems to be.
Not only do I not know the answer to this, I don’t think anyone does. My fear is that it will end up in the same state LLMs are now: it’s nobody’s fault so there isn’t really any incentive to fix problems like that.
Counter questions: How often do you believe wars happen? What is considered a war? Was the “Vietnam conflict” a war?
All the bad stuff aside, they would be fantastic assistive devices for folks who desperately need them. They never get tired or bored. It isn’t an inconvenience to get something off the top shelf or carry you up the stairs, even if it interrupts something else it was doing.
For me, it reinforces the Ned Stark school of war. If you decide to kill someone, you'd better be prepared to do it yourself.
There's gravity associated with making these choices and removing the human even further from the decision makes war even more inhumane than it already is.
This is an interesting question to me, and I think it’s especially interesting on the broader scope of automation. The concern you have with automated kills is, I assume, the chance of collateral damage — civilians being killed by autonomous agents. However, human operators kill civilians all the time. So to me, it seems like the ethical line has a few components to it.
The more interesting question to me is at what point does it become unethical to use human operators at all? We may be heading towards that zone with self driving cars, for example.
I'm unaware of any war that was ethical. Most are just poorly taught.
Both? The point of a battlefield is to do what works, and both have merits depending on the situation (especially fail over states). We've arguably had automated and remote controlled "robots" since smart bombs.
I think war crimes are mostly a joke as a concept. There are reasons to try and make war "civil" in that you basically say that 1000's of years of history has shown that needlessly torturing soldiers provides you nothing, if not actively harms your war effort (as they'll fight to the last), and that things like landmines are generational nightmares, but this idea that "this mass murder is legal and this one isn't" is related to my first point about war being poorly taught. No one is EVER held responsible for war crimes during war. They are used to justify punishments for the losers.
How does a robot accidentally commit a war crime and how is it different from a guided missile missing its target and killing civilians?
Yes. Humans are one of the biggest roadblocks to war. You can't up replacement by twisting a knob, and you sure as shit can't up training speed. Further every person in the war is probably someone who isn't contributing elsewhere. Fewer humans at risk means more opportunity unless there's other choke points. I don't think removing humans from war is anywhere near happening though.
Not much? They'll see adoption in every facet of society like every other tech? Most of it is still extremely niche in usage. People swore we'd be having amazon mini dogs walking around doing deliveries by now and it turns out that hyper expensive equipment that's smart but not human smart still costs way more than just having a delivery driver. People are poorly versed on the limitations of robots and tend to treat them, like AI, as if they're magic.
US soldiers were punished for war crimes related to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. I agree that during a hot war those kinds of issues are less prioritized, but let's not say that the victors never get punished. (The degree to which the USA "won" in Iraq is a separate question.)
They were not, this is objectively false and a big portion of the discussion around Abu Ghraib.
If the US military law did not say what they did was illegal, they would not have been punished at all (and that's a whole can of worms about who was and how anyways).
What do you mean with this? 11 US servicemembers were convinced and all were punished, most with substantial prison terms.
Edit: oh I see, you mean they were punished but for something else. Wartime sexual violence and torture are both frequently considered war crimes, so while it's true they were punished according to the UCMJ, they were punished for doing things generally considered to be war crimes. Are you pointing to the broader political point of "only the other guys do war crimes, not my guys"? If so it probably needs a bit more substantiation.
My point is that they were punished by the laws of the country. Not for war crimes.
If your country has different laws or changes those laws (as they often do when they’re in a more traditional war than what the US can do) then there’s no crime and thus no conviction.
There is a very real and legal definition of war crimes and saying that they’re convicted of them is just outright false.
The path of least resistance with automated robotics in the military I think is quite terrifying.
Ultimately, we find ourselves justifying some pretty dangerous and heinous shit when we feel that we need to defend against some great "other". A notable difference from today and the past, and a basis for optimism, is that we have much faster and reliable communication than we used to. The effect that this has on our psychology in conflict I believe is profound. When entire populations of people can communicate with each other with or without the consent of their leaders, you transform the all-consuming prisoner's dilemma into something more cooperative.
What I worry about is how hyper-stealthy, hyper long-range, autonomous robots of various forms may be deployed to project power against particular individuals. If paranoia sets in, we'll be in a sticky situation, since paranoia in you begets paranoia in other people and eventually someone will do something stupid that has the potential to set off a chain reaction.
The way forward I think is to balance idealism and realism. Something that has been lost in the age of realism in foreign policy is that there is real strategic value to doing the right thing and operating on principle. Excessively consequentialist thinking on the world stage rarely does you any good. Something that is lost with the dominant form of idealism, liberal idealism, is that it is perfectly possible for the organic collective will of a society to not be Locke-ian constitutional liberalism, in which case there is an awkward conflict between self-determination and democracy. What to do, in such a case, if democracies ostensibly never go to war with each other? Well, perhaps, stop thinking about democracy in such binary terms. There are elements of even Chinese and Russian governance that are democratic. There are elements of American or British governance that are not. We should all strive toward democracy, but drawing a line between democracies on one hand and Evil on the other is not productive, since it generates reactionary sentiment with your adversaries and since it simply isn't accurate.
If we appreciate the need for both idealism and realism in service of what we can all understand to be the good, we can start to converge onto credible and stable international frameworks for cooperation. We really have no other option with what technologies lie in our future.
basically, we need all of the countries to get together and to agree that blowing a lot of money on robots that fight each other is a waste of time and that they might as well scale it way back.... to ROBOT WARS... but with territory or whatever on the line.
I honestly don't know why nations bother with open war when you can do so much more with covert ops (break every law, openly murder, deny all etc)
Open war is the only way to get eventually global acknowledgement of new territorial possessions. It's kind of passé these days to bother trying to take territory directly when you can install a puppet government and get the resources you want from a country without having to actually have any significant responsibility for their citizenry. Even Russia only decided to try open military operations when their preferred puppet lost power in Ukraine.
Putin miscalculated, apparently due to having a very old-fashioned idea of imperialism. Such wars are no longer profitable.
Trump miscalculated, apparently because Israel talked him into thinking it would be easy.
If leaders didn’t make blunders, maybe there wouldn’t be wars?
I think that's a reasonable claim. Most wars are a terrible net loss even for the victor, if there is a victor.