> I wonder what it will be like in a decade or so looking back on the lovely period where only the US Government had lethal drones, and operated them with relative restraint.
You are exactly right. Except of course that the current 'relative restraint' is in the eye of the beholder, and it probably doesn't seem like 'relative restraint' to those living in certain areas of Pakistan.
But yeah, soon enough that'll be all of us. We're in for a world of horror. If we were wise, we'd be establishing the idea that military drones are to be prohibited by international treaty and considered a war crime, not normalizing them.
A international treaty would probably not work well, since military drones are actually useful for combat. Unlike biological weapons, were the victim has two weeks of incubation period to defeat you, or chemical weapons, which are quite useless against hardened targets. ( And since WWII there was no conflict which came close to the nuclear threshold.) Therefore an AI arms control regime would be a lot harder to construct than a WMD one.
Having said that, I am actually not very pessimistic about drones. I think that they are similar to cars, which enable a quick get away for the perpetrators of a crime, but are in fact more dangerous in accidents than as means of a crime. ( And similar, if there are thousands of pizza delivery drones then some of them will fall out of the sky by pure statistics.)
landmines are useful for combat too. Oh yeah, the US refuses to sign that one too, right?
If it wasn't useful for combat, nobody would use it, right? You only need international law to try and prevent things that _are_ useful in military objectives, but are so dangerous to humanity that we wish to prevent their use.
You are exactly right. Except of course that the current 'relative restraint' is in the eye of the beholder, and it probably doesn't seem like 'relative restraint' to those living in certain areas of Pakistan.
But yeah, soon enough that'll be all of us. We're in for a world of horror. If we were wise, we'd be establishing the idea that military drones are to be prohibited by international treaty and considered a war crime, not normalizing them.