I'm not exactly disagreeing, just noting that I read the opposite recently:
"Even though home and wife are just a few minutes’ drive down the road from his battle station, the peculiar detachment of drone warfare does not necessarily insulate Martin from his actions. Predator attacks are extraordinarily precise, but the violence of war can never be fully tamed, and the most gripping scenes in the book document Martin’s emotions on the occasions when innocent civilians wander under his crosshairs in the seconds just before his Hellfire missile arrives on target. Allied bomber pilots in World War II killed millions of civilians but rarely had occasion to experience the results on the ground. Drone operators work with far greater accuracy, but the irony of the technology is that its operators can see their accidental victims—two little boys and their shattered bikes, in one especially heartrending case Martin describes—in excruciating detail. Small wonder that studies by the military have shown that UAV operators sometimes end up suffering the same degree of combat stress as other warfighters."
Martins emotions pale compared to those of the innocent civilians that are no longer around.
Personally I'm happy that there is at least some cost to this but I don't think the cost is quite high enough to prevent a runaway use of this horrible technology.
If I were asked to help design/build such a system I would point blank refuse. I'm sure that some other person would step in to fill the vacancy with a smile on their face but I strongly believe that we all have a personal responsibility in what we help create and I don't see any of the users of these systems with the ability to create their own. It takes a lot of tech to launch a missile by remote control from a plane controlled from a large distance with any accuracy.
The people that built this probably sleep just fine but imo they have blood on their hands. And don't give me that 'guns don't kill people' nonsense, if you make weapons for the military you carry your bit.
Being a pascifist is a luxury that cannot necessarily be afforded by everyone. Competition is an inextricable part of life, and military force still trumps most other forms of competition as a last resort. The next disruption in military technology has arrived, and those that dominate this type of warfare will likely dominate future battles, just as the American air force has allowed the American military to dominate since WW2. I wish it weren't so, but having a strong military is still important, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. If you're not the strongest, and you're not friends with the strongest, you lose a lot of self determinism. So, it's important that we focus on making the best unmanned combat vehicles possible, if only to be able to maintain the luxury of pacifism, because people in other countries don't necessarily share your moral qualms.
I'm not a pacifist. You hit me I hit back. But I decide that on a case-by-case basis and to give others the ability to indiscriminately kill people that I have no beef with sounds like a very bad idea.
I agree with the sentiment. I work on computer vision systems that have application to this area and there's a line beyond which I won't go. I'm not sure where it is exactly. For instance, there are researchers working on human detection for these systems, which can have applications in attacking and in avoiding; the tech is independent of intent.
IMHO the discipline of robotics is facing some of the same agonizing choices that atomic physics faced in the 1930s-1960s. The moral dimension of their work took the physicists largely by surprise. It would be a naive roboticist who did not see the same questions coming this time.
"Even though home and wife are just a few minutes’ drive down the road from his battle station, the peculiar detachment of drone warfare does not necessarily insulate Martin from his actions. Predator attacks are extraordinarily precise, but the violence of war can never be fully tamed, and the most gripping scenes in the book document Martin’s emotions on the occasions when innocent civilians wander under his crosshairs in the seconds just before his Hellfire missile arrives on target. Allied bomber pilots in World War II killed millions of civilians but rarely had occasion to experience the results on the ground. Drone operators work with far greater accuracy, but the irony of the technology is that its operators can see their accidental victims—two little boys and their shattered bikes, in one especially heartrending case Martin describes—in excruciating detail. Small wonder that studies by the military have shown that UAV operators sometimes end up suffering the same degree of combat stress as other warfighters."
It's from this review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/predato...
of P.W. Singer's recent book.