thanks for your compliment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What was that, AC troll? I can't hear you... login and try again.

Cruise missile are analogous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And they have been analogous for decades.

latest and greatest... but even the tomahawk course corrects etc.

As to land mines being banned... debatable. They're still commonly employed by all major powers. What the UN deems bad is frequently irrelevant. Law is what is enforced. And the ban on land mines is not enforced.

liability for software faults... this implies there is legal liability in war... which is generally not the case. Liability is only relevant if the winner decides to take the loser to court. If the winner commits war crimes... what are you going to do to him? Jack or shit?

As to the tech going haywire... sure. And? Any weapons system can do that. Your concern is what, a war machine going nuts and just killing lots of people indiscriminately? You think the military doesn't care if that happens? Believe me, they're the last people to take that lightly because who is likely to be near the fucking thing when it does that? Our own forces. So believe me when I say there will be all sorts of fail safes put in place to keep the thing from going nuts.

Now enemies spoofing sensor or hacking or whatever to confuse the system. Sure. That's just EW. The systems will be designed to deal with assumed level of EW threat. And as the enemy upgrades their EW we'll upgrade our ECC. That's just how weapons tech goes. One side upgrades a weapon and the other side updates armor or tactics or something to counter it. Back and forth.

I don't see your problem with using drones for area denial. What is your concern? that small children will wander into a denied area and eat a computer targeted sniper round to the face?

Mines and these drones are different in that we're not going to just leave them there. They're too expensive to do that and the have mobility so they can reposition themselves. Think of the drones like a mobile mine field. You move those behind the enemy as the anvil and then you move your primary manned force in as the hammer. Gong. I don't understand what the problem is with using the drones that way. They won't maneuver outside of their zone of operation. They'll move around to get shots or avoid counter fire or avoid getting flanked or to get close to an ally drone to provide suppression fire... etc. Whatever the tactical doctrine is... But the point is that they're not ranging around and I wouldn't suggest they be used to attack autonomously. I'd rather suggest they be used to DEFEND autonomously.

Again consider the base defense scenario. I have a mobile command center in contested territory. I am moving my forces deeper into enemy territory and I have a temporary base of operations. Drones are an excellent perimeter defense. First, if they get ambushed which is a common fate for sentries then I just lose a robot. Not a big deal. And now the enemy has revealed themselves near me and no allied soldiers were lost in the surprise. My own forces can now respond with a general awareness of what is going on limiting further allied causalities. The drones also don't get bored, tired, hungry, need to take a shit, etc... the other things sentries normally do that makes them less effective. Lets say the drones go out there, burrow into the ground a little bit with just their sensors poking out... and very very patiently... wait. Maybe the drones can sit there listening and being quite for a week or more. However long the batteries last in standby mode. And when the energy supplies get low, the drones dig themselves out of their holes, and roll back into base to be refueled and go through a maintenance cycle. A replacement drone is sent to replace that drone before it even digs itself out so there is no gap in the defenses.

Just an example. I'm not talking about unleashing autonomous drones on cities to go letting god sort the innocent from the guilty. The damn drone isn't going to be able to tell one thing from another in an environment like that. So you put the drone in simple situations where it is very obvious what is going on and you feel comfortable with the drone engaging anything that moves in that zone.

As to whether or not I'd count my own dead. Of course I would. I'd count them seperately though. I'm not rolling all the numbers together.

I want a number for my own dead.
I want a number for enemy dead.
I want a number of civilians I killed.
I want a number of civilians the enemy killed.
And you might as well throw out some estimates of how many 'excessive deaths" happened MINUS the above numbers. Though I warn you that I"m going to take that stat with fucking bags of rock salt.

As to your statement that you're not moralizing. Okay. Any attempt to morally judge US actions in this thread going forward is going to pointed at and I'm going to ask why you're doing it.

I do not expect i'll have to wait long.

As to the US not directly fighting the Russians and Chinese in vietname. Debatable. Absent Russian and Chinese support the Vietcong would not have been a credible resistance. There was a vibrant supply network. And there was also intelligence provided to them by the Russians and all sorts of other stuff. All of which ignores the point that we were directly fighting the Chinese in Korea and we didn't nuke them. What is more, in Korea we also engaged Russian pilots with some frequency and that didn't lead to nuclear war either.

No one wants a nuclear war... nukes are vastly over rated for their utility in diplomacy. Do you find the French to be formidable military powers? They have nukes. And no one cares.

This implies that people I deem enemy are done arbitrarily and unreasonably and without due consideration. That's not an argument I've seen you even attempt to make. And here you are presuming. Rejected.

And as to your statement that I don't consider collateral damage, this is obviously a very very stupid strawman because I made it clear repeatedly that my people have invested our blood and treasure into avoiding collateral damage. Name any other country in history that has taken the same pains to limit collateral damage.

Try.

You instantly fail. And from this you presume I don't care?

To the contrary, you know I care which is why you're trying to pull my heart strings on the issue. You know damn fucking well I care. I simply reject your notion that people the taliban kill are my fault. That's fucking stupid. I reject your number. If you want to cite collateral damage figures then I'll count civilians that I deem civilians that were accidentally killed by US weapons. THAT is what I deem collateral damage. I do not deem enemy actions my OWN collateral damage. that's absurd.

As to what is and is not necessary... that is also something you're going to have to show.

So your extremist point rests on three premises:

1. That I deem people enemy lightly or arbitrarily or without good and just cause.
2. That I do not care about collateral damage which is just fucking stupid.
3. That my actions or the actions I approve of are unnecessary.

You've substantiated none of that.

You are a space hamster and you cannot have our broccoli.

As to your ad hominems... I know what ad hominem is... so... you might as well give that up and try a less silly rhetorical tactic. Your sophistry is frankly really obvious. I'd ask you abandon it and try to make a more legitimate argument. I'm open to other view points. Just not to bullshit.

Assuming I care, I patch/crack it so that it does what I fucking tell it to do.

And everyone in America forgets how pigeons have a tendency to come home to roost. Remember - they hate you for your "freedoms"!

No, shit for brains. I just got done telling you that I expect any subsequent OS to require tweaking to correct bullshit in it.

I did not say that I could verbatim use the exact same tweaks in 7 forever.

Don't even respond. Just sit down and feel shame.

But they're not actual AI. I mean, you might as well outlaw cruise missiles or why not claymores and mines?

A drone killer doesn't just kill anything in its zone. It has a threat profile its looking for and so far that profile has been so specific that the actual literal target is specified. aka... THAT truck or THAT house or whatever. Its not "stuff that looks like a truck" or "stuff that looks like a house" or "people".

its specific to a DUDE.

now the sort of stuff the military is talking about automating are things like drone tanks that will deploy to zones and then shoot anything that moves in that area... and potentially be able to tell the difference between stuff so they don't just shoot anything. But the problem with not shooting anything that moves is that it would be very easy for a human being to walk up to one of those drone tanks with a big sachel anti tank bomb, put it on the tank and walk away... Boom... end of tank. That's likely not ideal. So you start running into concepts like drone tanks as area denial weapons like mine fields. So they go to an area and they will totally kill anything in that zone that does not squak an IFF. So you can use them for base defense, holding an enemy in pinned by putting the drone tanks on one side of their base and then moving in manned forces on the other side to pincer them between the two. The drone tanks being used to cut off escape.

There are ways to use this...

Another play on the same concept is air defense attack drones. They would engage ANY airplane that enters the zone. Ideally not a commercial airliner full of orphans. But the idea is the air defense drones can operate the way our other drones operate. Long endurance. hanging out over a target all day... Patient. The ground attack air drones are probably going to remain human targeted. I don't really know why we'd change that. The human operations use the close support bombers as artillery in the sky basically. Guy on the ground says "kill that"... and the drone does. And then of course there is the naval model... drone torpedoes that just hang out and wait. Ship enters the waters without squawking an IFF... BOOOM. Again, area denial. Don't want to get hit... stay out of those waters. This could be used to defend harbors in contested territory, seeded behind enemy lines to sow chaos as shipping gets hit with random torpedeos from subs that aren't there. Also very dangerous engagements against well defended naval targets. Send the drone torpedo in slow, deep, and silent. Moving a couple miles an hour... just edging in there... and then when it detects the target... slowly slowly... BOOM. or possibly it latches on to the side of the ship and does something else. The damn thing could hack the enemy ship's network for all I know. Whatever is deemed desirable.

This notion of the terminator killer robots is not how they'll be used. We don't trust them and they're not that smart.

mostly useful for regulating bandwidth... not what I'd call a proper firewall.