Comment by sarchertech
8 days ago
> Same goes for the landmines, once placed.
Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.
Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.
> Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time.
Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.
With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?
But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.
No disagreement there.
I would even argue that anything that enables broad-area targetting since the invention of the Maxim machine gun and artillery would qualify as a weapon of mass destruction. In an ideal world, the first machine gun or dynamite would've made everyone see war as a very bad resolution mechanism since the 19th century.
But here we are, so the game is to not make war much worse than it already is.