http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/23/us-arms-robots-idUKBRE93M12620130423

At the outset of such an idea… that robots will be the ruin of us all, it may seem a little silly.

It may.

But it is no joke.

Autonomous killer robots are without many of the characteristics that we dislike in human soldiers (human frailty, hate, rage, envy, pride, prejudice etc.), but human soldiers still know, by virtue of their being human, that there are some orders not to be followed.

And this latter point is both the reason why military strategists probably want unmanned robots in the sky (and in the battlefield generally), and why it would be a terrible mistake for us to go down that path.

Paying a life for a life… ie, sending a man into combat to do x (perhaps, kill another) has many benefits, one of which is that the cost for our action is often at least the human life that we put into it.

err….

Hell, if there were no cost for war… why would the public ever be against it? Perhaps (and excuse me if I here sound callous) the human cost (with respect to one’s own soldiers) is an appropriate fee. And, as I noted above, the “soul”, as it were, of a human soldier can be a source of good in the otherwise no good situation of battle.

Really though, let us invest our greatest technologies and efforts into not-war. I don’t believe there will be much resistance to that idea.

– J