kleinbl00:

This is dumb.

There's been a legit book about this since 2009. it's a thought-provoking question that plenty of smart people have been grappling with for the better part of a decade. Being flippant about it helps nobody; there are two massive issues that have fuckall to do with "smart bottles" or a fucking Wilson connected football, namely that (1) drone pilots at Creech AFB in Las Vegas are conducting acts of war in Pakistan which means according to the Geneva Convention it is legitimate to target Las Vegas as part of conflict in Pakistan (2) by using autonomous weapons you actually bypass big important parts of the law of warfare and commit lethal acts within an undefined treatyspace.

See this thing?

The thing on top is a fully-autonomous 4-rack MANPADS autonomous weapons system that you can just sorta turn on and have it shoot down aircraft. Thales has been selling it for about five years now. They're hardly alone; here's a glimpse of the Korean DMZ:

We've been grappling with these problems for 40 years now. There were rumors of autoguns on the Berlin Wall but they were actually closer to Claymore mines. Regardless, smart people have had smart things to say for a long while now and maybe it's the whiskey but throwing a picture of fuckin' Bender up in there doesn't do anything to address the actual issues at hand and obfuscates some honest-to-god real issues with legit scary shit that should probably be treated with less flippancy than is on display.

Food for thought: an autonomous hunter-killer is effectively a land mine and you know who hasn't signed the land mine treaty?

Yeah.

Sorry. I know this is supposed to be cute. Dubai has a plan and we don't. Whatever. Tell that to my friends who build shit in Dubai.

Tell that to the hundreds of workers that get disappeared whenever they try to have a plan.


posted 2707 days ago