Robots and War

[mishalak]

Robot armies won't eliminate killing. It will make it more suddenly terrible. It is one thing to give a group of men an order to kill other men or a whole people, but if it is made using a clean interface that will not reflect the horror inherent in such orders it will become easier to exterminate a whole people. I think intellectual morality will tend to keep the robot armies in check. In fact in their first uses they might actually reduce enemy casualties since a commander would be more willing to risk a robot than one of his men, but if a war goes on long enough or there are enough wars where robots engage against humans I think there could be a gradual erosion of the reluctance to engage to kill. Because the one sure way to make sure that an enemy does not rise up again to fight is to kill all of them. And without having to see the results of such orders in person there will be less reason not to.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

All it's going to take is one general of a robot army determining it's more economical to kill people (who build more robots) than destroy robots...

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I agree with the note that in addition the general has to not be worried about political repercussions of such orders. It would have to be a desperate war that is either being lost or isn't moving nearly fast enough. Or perhaps a dirty war like a civil one.

[gomeza.livejournal.com]

The people who are giving strategic orders and setting the rules of engagement are already far removed from combat or having to witness the effects of warfare.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is true. And it is exactly that which enabled the scale of mass killing in the 20th Century. And it is also the experience of the 20th century that makes me think that using robots in war won't always cause mass murder. There is a certain amount of intellectual morality, that is making the right decisions in regards to an abstract human being rather than with the living breathing person in front of the commander.

I think robots are going to mostly make war cleaner, more precise. But there will be exceptions that will be more terrible than anything we have seen to date. I am speculating that as bad as events like the holocaust, the soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, and so on were, they would have been worse without the necessity of having humans on the ground to carry out the orders. I've read and seen a lot of stories where soldiers quietly refrained from carrying out their orders to the last detail and spared some lives as a result.