War By Remote Control, With Military Robots Set To Self Destruct 144
New submitter RougeFive writes "A new wave of Kamikaze unmanned military aircraft, ground robots and water vessels are being built to deliberately destroy themselves as they hit their targets. Since it now makes more economic sense to have them crash into enemy targets rather than engage them, and since direct impact needs only manned or automated navigation rather than the highly-trained skills of multiple operators, these UAVs could well become the de-facto method of engagement of the future."
Re:You mean... (Score:4, Interesting)
but over WIFI and more expensive?
Like autonomous and more expensive, although there's no need for them to be. Smart rocks will soon be almost as cheap as dumb rocks, if enough stupid people with technical educations are let loose.
For the people who feel like killing people is a good way to spend their time and use their education: please use plain language to describe what you do. "Method of engagement" is a coward's way of saying "means of killing people and destroying things."
Take the extra time to use the extra words that actually describe what you're using your incredibly sophisticated abilities for, and don't hide behind euphemisms like some prim Victorian virgin who doesn't have the guts to say she wants a good hard fucking.
Re:bombs with non-traditional locomotion... (Score:3, Interesting)
What lessons? They're fiction. History can teach lessons, but fiction, especially science fiction, is speculation. I suppose Atlas Shrugged teaches important lessons about philosophy, and KSR's Mars Trilogy proffers valuable insight into economics?
The idea that fiction can teach important "lessons" is one of the worst popular ideas I know of. Usually when people say stuff like that, they really mean only the lessons they agree with.
Re:bombs with non-traditional locomotion... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lesson can take many forms. An example of a "lesson" not based on history, but on fiction, could be Aesop's Fables, they're widely considered to be "lessons" for children, if disagree with the term lesson being applied that's fine, but frankly most people know what I meant, and since that's the point of written and spoken language, I'm cool with it.
Anyway, it's a matter of semantics--my point, which of course is half-joking, is that a movie, which was fictional, which came out in 1984 which contained depictions of remote controlled, and self-directed, armed robots which were created to replace human military personnel in dangerous situations. I know it's fiction, but at a high level it's awfully parallel to what we are apparently working toward today. So the lesson/speculation/advice/whatever that I believe should be taken away from this work of fiction is that it would be a good idea to avoid turning all control over the killer robots to a single mind (whether it's a single human, small group of humans ("hive mind"), or artificial intelligence).