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0 pointsdahart6y ago0 comments

> The logical extreme of this [...] Is that your ideal world?

Clearly not. Would you please not post an extreme straw-man and turn this into polarizing ideological judgement? The post you’re responding to very clearly agreed that war is morally questionable, and very clearly argued for middle ground or better, not going to some extreme.

You don’t have to agree with war or endorse any kind of killing in any way to see that some of the activities involved by some of the people are trying to prevent damage rather than cause it.

Intentionally choosing not to acknowledge the nuance in someone’s point of view is ironic in this discussion, because that’s one of the ways that wars start.

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kragen6y ago· 2 in thread

You assert that "software that does a better job of, say, facial recognition to lessen the likelihood of a predator drone killing an innocent civilian" is "middle ground", "not going to some extreme", "trying to prevent damage", and "nuanced".

It is none of those. It is a non-nuanced extreme that is going to cause damage and kill those of us in the middle ground. Reducing it to a comic book is a way to cut through the confusion and demonstrate that. If you have a reason (that reasonable people will accept) to think that the comic-book scenario is undesirable, you will find that that reason also applies to the facial-recognition-missiles case — perhaps more weakly, perhaps more strongly, but certainly well enough to make it clear that amplifying the humans' power of violence in that way is not going to prevent damage.

Moreover, it is absurd that someone is proposing to build Slaughterbots and you are accusing me of "turn[ing] this into polarizing ideological judgement" because I presented the commonsense, obvious arguments against that course of action.

p1esk6y ago

What's your moral stance on developing defense mechanisms against Slaughterbot attacks? What if the best defense mechanism is killing the ones launching the attacks?

kragen6y ago

I think developing defense mechanisms against Slaughterbot attacks is a good idea, because certainly they will happen sooner or later. If the best defense mechanism is killing the ones launching the attacks, we will see several significant consequences:

1. Power will only be exercised by the anonymous and the reckless; government transparency will become a thing of the past. If killing the judge who ruled against you, or the school-board member who voted against teaching Creationism, or the wife you're convinced is cheating on you, is as easy and anonymous as buying porn on Amazon, then no president, no general, no preacher, no judge, and no police officer will dare to show their face. The only people who exercise power non-anonymously would be those whose impulsiveness overcomes their better judgment.

2. To defend against anonymity, defense efforts will necessarily expand to kill not only those who are certain to be the ones launching the attacks, but those who have a reasonable chance of being the ones launching the attacks. Just as the Khmer Rouge killed everyone who wore glasses or knew how to read, we can expect that anyone with the requisite skills whose loyalty to the victors is in question will be killed. Expect North-Korea-style graded loyalty systems in which having a cousin believed to have doubted the regime will sentence you to death.

3. Dead-Hand-type systems cannot be defended against by killing their owners, only by misleading their owners as to your identity. So they become the dominant game strategy. This means that it isn't sufficient to kill people once they are launching attacks; you must kill them before they have a chance to deploy their forces.

4. Battlefields will no longer have borders; war anywhere will mean war everywhere. Combined with Dead Hand systems, the necessity for preemptive strikes, and the enormous capital efficiency of precision munitions, this will result in a holocaust far more rapid and complete than nuclear weapons could ever have threatened.

While this sounds like an awesome plot for a science-fiction novel, I'd rather live in a very different future.

So, I hope that we can develop better defense mechanisms than just drone-striking drone pilots, drone sysadmins, and drone programmers. For example, pervasive surveillance (which also eliminates what we know as "human rights", but doesn't end up with everyone inevitably dead within a few days); undetectable subterranean fortresses; living off-planet in small, high-trust tribes; and immune-system-style area defense with nets, walls, tiny anti-aircraft guns, and so on. With defense mechanisms such as these, the Drone Age should be more survivable than the Nuclear Age.

But, if we can't develop better defense mechanisms than killing attackers, we should delay the advent of the drone holocaust as long as we can, enabling us to enjoy what remains of our lives before it ends them.

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