Autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

Posted by deadgopher 2 hours ago

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Comment by saltcured 25 minutes ago

I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.

These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.

Comment by nickff 4 minutes ago

I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.

Comment by damnitbuilds 1 hour ago

If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there.

If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there.

Why is the latter worse than the former ?

Comment by e12e 30 minutes ago

They can both be bad.

One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.

"No quarter" is a war crime.

Comment by nickff 1 minute ago

This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...

Comment by adampunk 15 minutes ago

Willingness to play.

It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.

Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.