This is really cool tech, but given the current political state, I can't help but worry about a powerful army of robots -- presumably with weapons attached -- being put into the hands of a leader we might consider to have "unreliable" judgement.
I wonder: if a country can deploy an army of robots to achieve its military ends, how does that play out in the long run? Does this mean future wars will just be "our" droids versus "theirs"? Does this "solve" terrorism in the long run, or make it much worse. Also, seeing aggressive robots feels scary.
In the short-medium term? It makes it easier for democratic countries to wage war, just or unjust. No more footage of coffins draped in flags coming off transport planes. No more soldiers coming home with PTSD or concussion-induced dementia. Just a bunch of guys in Langley, sitting in their cubicles, killing people on the other side of the world.
The domestic propaganda goes down much smoother at this point. After all, who wants peace when we can win?
If they could route the link through a constellation of LEO satellites, then the lag would probably be comparable to what you get in a typical multiplayer FPS. Ground to LEO and back is 1ms to 14ms, depending on how high in LEO the satellite is (assuming satellite directly above your head). Space is pretty close to us.
As for how to get that constellation up, well, SpaceX is working on making that pretty cheap.
I'm actually not from the US so hadn't heard of her until now. But I just read about her, and it sounds like she was a pretty awesome lady! And now you've got me curious about the lag...
I'm guessing they could (would?) go most of the way via undersea cable (just as normal folks do), pop out somewhere close and then beam up to some satellite. I'm in Australia, and (I think) Puerto Rico is roughly on the other side of the word (although I did get a D in high school geography, so there's a good chance I'm wrong here). My round-trip ping time averages ~320ms to some random PR ISP (209.91.222.104). I have no idea how much extra latency a last-stage satellite hop would add in, but let's say it triples the latency.
Almost a second in lag. So pretty terrible. I guess they'd need to use characters, er drones, with good AoE attacks...
Even if the current policital leadership was someone you considered reliable and trustworthy, you should still be worried, because four or eight years from now someone you don't trust could be in control.
I guess I'd worry more about rogue nations developing (cheaper) biological weapons and chemical weapons. I imagine it would be easier to build something like [1] than a robot like this.
States have always been constrained by what their soldiers are willing to do for them. It's the difference between Tiananmen Square and Russia a couple years later. I think taking away that constraint is a bigger deal than how robots might change the nature of wars between states.
This particular robot doesn't strike me as especially military, though yeah, it's kind of scary-moving.
What is even the point of having a war once you are fighting with robot armies? Why not just throw a coin and hand the country over to the side that picked the correct outcome? Use an unfair coin to correct for military strength. Or each side sends its best players for a game of Risk or Rock, Paper, Scissors or Command and Conquer.
You get a winer and a loser, it does not take years and costs a fortune and you avoid all the unnecessary loss of life and the damage you have to fix after the war. That seems like a win for everyone involved. Well, that could actually also work right now, no need to wait for robot armies.
In this episode, the crew of the USS Enterprise visits a planet whose people
fight a computer-simulated war against a neighboring planet. Although the
war is fought via computer simulation, the citizens of each planet have to
submit to real executions inside "disintegration booths" to meet the casualty
counts of the simulated attacks.
You get rid of destroying assets but keep killing people. It is kind of an improvement if you just compare the losses incurred in this kind of war as compared to normal war, after all you are not losing your assets. But morally it seems actually worse to me. You decide to lessen the consequences of a war but you decide to keep your assets but keep killing people.
It won't work because actually enforcing a meaningful loss requires a real war.
Otherwise, no matter if you believe if you have got a 50% or 10% chance of victory (or even no chance, but a certainty of painful losses for the opponent) then it makes all kinds of practical sense for the loser to say "screw the coin/game" and simply ignore the result and escalate it further.
If a reasonable settlement acceptable to both sides can be negotiated, then it doesn't need the coin or game in the first place; and if someone can enforce the conditions on the loser without a horrible cost, then there's no need for a game or a war since it can be done as a simple ultimatum.
For lack of a better word, that was meant more cynical than something that has actually any chance of working. It just seems to be a somewhat logical continuation of the idea of a war where everyone just sends robots to the front lines to fight things out. But you are of course right, the correct conclusion is probably that there can not be a war just fought by robots.
After one robot army has defeated the other one it has to go after human soldiers, assets or even civilians to achieve a victory or must at least be willing to do so unless the opposing country surrendes at this prospect. Just defeating the robot army and then doing nothing will not be effective beyond the inflicted loss of resources.
If the simulation is reasonably predictive and the spoils of war not too severe then the loser won't start the war because they would npt expect to gain enough.
This is what democracy is, a coarse estimate of who has the most soldiers. A 90% majority can do what they want, a 51% majority needs to compromise a little.
Just as the purpose of a war isn't to determine who's stronger but an extension of diplomacy with violence as a tool, a simulation isn't needed to determine who's weaker, countries already have a good idea on that. If the results are reasonably predictable and the request is not too severe, then you don't need a simulation, game or coin toss, ordinary diplomacy does that well; this is how events like Sudatenland takeover in last century or Crimea takeover in this century happened without a fight.
However, in an actual war many things matter more than the numbers or fighting power. For example, it is clear that ISIS is much weaker than the full USA military, however, because defeating ISIS in an actual land war would cause significant casualties to USA, they can go on - a clear simulation result showing that they would lose won't ever be enough for them to concede defeat since they can (and will) simply call it as a bluff and claim that USA is not willing to pay the blood price. So you can't settle a conflict like this with a simulation; the loser always has the backup plan of telling "make me, if you dare" instead of accepting the loss.
Agreeing to a result of simulations that both sides believe isn't settling undecided disputes nonviolently, it's just old fashioned diplomacy or ultimatum/surrender.
If one side has the robot army, they'll target the human soldiers on the other side. If both sides have robot armies, they'll probably target one anothers' civilians.
Nations are never going to rid themselves of the desire for war, or the need for war to involve bloodshed, because we're just another species of simian bludgeoning the out-group to death with extremely abstract and over-engineered rocks. We already have non-violent ways to resolve conflicts between nations, we fight wars explicitly to kill people.
[...] they'll probably target one anothers' civilians.
Which would be a first class war crime.
Nations are never going to rid themselves of the desire for war, or the need for war to involve bloodshed, because we're just another species of simian bludgeoning the out-group to death with extremely abstract and over-engineered rocks.
While that is not an uncommon point of view empirical evidence suggests otherwise, war seems to be in decline and seems to have shifted from wars between nations to civil wars and asymmetric wars.
Some argue that advances in human behavior heavily lag behind technological advances and I tend to agree at least somewhat, but concluding that we will never manage to overcome this stupidity seems not really obvious to me. And I certainly hope that it is not true.
We already have non-violent ways to resolve conflicts between nations, we fight wars explicitly to kill people.
Force is the ultimate and only way to »resolve« conflicts if all other means fail. But I do not think we are killing people for the sake of it in wars, it is just a means to an end.
Because killing thousands upon thousands of innocent Afghanis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis and Syrian civilians so far with relatively conventional weapons has been reliable judgement? Maybe with robot armies they could have killed even more. These partisan trenches are blinding so many.
Of course those deaths are horrible. Even a single needless death is the most tragic thing in the world. The point of my question was that "conventional" weapons are still limited compared to robotic warfare / AI. Very strong military in the hands of a repressive regime has always been bad, but I fear the robot military age will make it far worse.
I wonder: if a country can deploy an army of robots to achieve its military ends, how does that play out in the long run? Does this mean future wars will just be "our" droids versus "theirs"? Does this "solve" terrorism in the long run, or make it much worse. Also, seeing aggressive robots feels scary.