Note to the author of article. Amy Goodman had a real interview with Singer last week. Jon Stuart's was amusing, but you wouldn't get much from it. Anyone who is intersted in a meaningful understanding can check it out on Democracy Now website. It was a profoundly important interview, in my opinion.

It turns out that a group of college students who had raised a half million dollars to help the people of Darfur sent out emails to different organizations and got an offer from a private defense contractor to sell them some drones to wage their own war with the money they'd raised. They considered it until they were talked out of it. I don't have all the details, but the point is that, of course, anyone can wage their own private war with robotics.

Robotic killing by robotic killers from a robotic Empire.

smipypr

While the use of robotics may never reach the level seen in science fiction, as military contractors see the light, robotics will become the $30,000 toilet seats of the 21st century. Our soldiers, sailors, and pilots are being knocked off by guys in sweatsuits and sneakers, using home-made bombs and AK 47's. Soldiers in the field carry over 40 pounds of assorted gear, not including whatever body armor they have available. We don't need drones, robots, guns that shoot around corners, or cluster bombs. The US armed forces desperately need well-defined missions, competent commanders, and solid, serviceable equipment and materiel. The current engagements were not planned beyond their initial headlines. With no real progress being made, and the spiral of destabilization getting deeper, the best alternative would be to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, regroup, rethink, and redeploy only if necessary, and only with specific, realistic, and manageable missions.

Asimov saw it coming:

"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."

Let's adopt Asimov's laws and give 'em teeth. Making robotic killers should be illegal. At least a soldier knows suffering while he's inflicting it. If something's going to kill me I want it to feel it.

"To some, the use of robots is an admission of cowardice, an unwillingness to fight with honor."

Amusing rhetoric, this one.

In the history of warfare, weapons innovations trend toward longer-range, more easily operated hand-held weapons and/or artillery...then delivery systems get more complex with planes and ballistic missiles. Now we have remote controlled weapons platforms that can be operated by a six year-old. But MIT has to make them.

You used to have light troops from the "useless" population--they needed little training, had crappy weaponry and were put on the front lines to protect the often landed, better (and more expensively) equipped heavy troops who would actually benefit socially from taking a town. Honor is a construction that means successfully killing for your commander, thereby allowing you a big allotment of war booty or further confidence. For that a soldier needed huge amounts of training and a good set of weapons, along with a few fine, highly trained horses.

Then as anybody could be trained to the same fighting level (a bullet goes through fancy armor nicely), governments and their war machines became more centralized (if they were effective in the first place)...nobility roosts behind the lines barking orders, they get favors from the government still and the grunts are still massacred. But the fighting skill level of those on the battlefield decreases. This is why boot-camp is all about push-ups: you have to feel tough, otherwise you might realize that a howitzer will vaporize you--your ability to fire a machine gun doesn't mean squat.

Honor slowly devolved from the actual ability to be effective in fighting to the bravery it takes to jump on a grenade for your fellow soldiers or charge a machine gun nest--to save your friends or beat the numbers game for the generals. Its only hang-on is that people perceive serving one's country or "protecting the weak" to be the definition of honor. Prowess in battle is no longer the case.

As our boom-sticks get easier to operate by the end-user and more complex to develop, deploy and maintain, warfare indeed will change greatly. However, the concept of marshal honor...well, it doesn't really mean much any more. Its only function is to justify war and elevate the status (and self-opinion) of soldiers in the psyche of the public, thus enabling war without revolution at home.

In the future, PSYOPs will function less on the honorable soldier then, and more on rabid fear (it's inane to claim a machine-gun bot is helping rape victims in Darfur). But of course this will be amusing because more skilled (read educated) people will be required to produce their machines stateside. And the opposition's robots will attack, say, the suburbs around Intel, which will quite likely piss the populace off even worse then when they send boys from the farmlands in to die. The only way out of this scenario is to do as we already do: fight only weaker armies and consolidate world control amongst heavily industrialized nations. That, and to point the weapons at our own populace.

Nutters!

(Sorry for the TLDR post)

Uhm, why not update Asimov's "Laws of Robotics", to "Laws of Common Humanity":

A human may not injure a human being (and so forth)...

Then problems with robots would be moot, well, as long as humans followed the laws...
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There's a glory in the morning because the earth turns 'round and a promise in the evening when the sun goes down