Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Aren't we already there?

Just ask the Afghans and Pakistanis... and the Iraqis, Yemenis...
The growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues, and threatens to make war more likely as armed robots take over from human beings, according to an internal study by the Ministry of Defence.

The report warns of the dangers of an "incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality", referring to James Cameron's 1984 movie, in which humans are hunted by robotic killing machines. It says the pace of technological development is accelerating at such a rate that Britain must quickly establish a policy on what will constitute "acceptable machine behaviour".
Just like the horribly irresponsible misuse of Tasers by the police force, drones remove several inhibitors to killing when soldiers aren't on the ground and judging the situation up close. If we are to live with such devices, we need to make it harder for authorities to use rather than easier. To start with, a list of how many innocent people have died would be ... educational.

We've talked about this before.

This never ends well.

Photobucket

3 comments:

mahakal said...

Brace yourself

Steve Bates said...

I think I met that guy once, and not in a movie theater...

Armed remotely piloted drones seem to me to have almost unlimited potential for wreaking havoc. That way lies chaos. I suppose every "improvement" in the weapons of war has been met with righteous allegations of immorality, but the really bad ones ("bad" in a moral sense, not just "bad" as in "effective") seem to be raising their ugly heads (see picture) every year or two lately. I am glad my Dad, who had quite enough of war in his youth, did not live to see this.

[CAPTCHA text: "blingrot"... no explanation needed!]

ellroon said...

I appreciate the link, mahakal... a whole lot of Skynet references came up on that day on Facebook and I had no clue as to the source. ... and I was too lazy to look it up.

Steve, the repeated deaths of innocents in Yemen, and the Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.. Why on earth do they think this is something not to be horrified by? Something to address? We're making sure we have enough terrorists in the making for an excuse to keep on with the wars?

Blingrot: verb; to have one's excessive amount of jewelry suddenly fall off one's body in pieces...