What are you talking about? Are you seriously saying there weren’t protests that Gaddafi didn’t try to squelch in the months before the civil war???

Sad thing is that wether the US Government nor the american population learned from this but instead keep on repeating their errors.

American people don’t give a FLYING FUCK how many brown people we murder, as long as johnny doughboy is not coming home in a body bag.

I don’t look forward to it, but I feel the karmic retribution for America and it’s apathetic, racist, decadent people will be terrible.

AI is a great idea, for entertainment.

By the time you’ve reached this point, recruiting new pilots has little to do with personal sacrifice for the good of the group, it’s just financial incentives…. and the fascist nature of it all just never enters the equation.

 Who really thinks the enemy is going to up the ante with robots of their own, or try to ‘fight fair’ against this sort of thing? It’s an open invitation to terrorism.

 There’s a reason that bioweapons, poison gas, and nuclear weapons are illegal This kind of thing should be made illegal for the same reason.

I think the simple fact that there is still some risk involved (obtusely for the politicians), the wars are limited in scope… though the wars don’t appear to have any real goals or targets for triggering an end.

If killing and risk to soldiers (and politicians) becomes any more minimized, is there any reason to not be at war constantly (aside from cost).  Ethics and some sort of goal seems to have been taken out of the equation at some point in the 1990s.

The USA has not fought a war for “survival” since 1945. The wars that have been fought since then have been “punishment” for something, often not related to the USA in a very direct way. The “war on terror” as a response to 9-11, is dubious at best. The people have to be behind the war, but most won’t continue to support a war when lots of people they know are dying without an imminent threat to their own personal safety. It appears that outlawing box cutters and adding in porno-scanners have taken care of this for the most part (for the last 10 years+ 10 days or so).

The wars as they are being fought are not winnable (are they intended to be?). The last big war that america fought with the intention of winning was WW2. Luckily for the Japanese people, the emperor was able to come to his senses and surrender while there was still time left. The germans fared better due to a closer cultural link and were lucky enough to not have “perpetrated a dastardly sneak attack”. Those wars were winnable as the US military (and people) had this idea that if you manage to kill off the enemy and or make the idea of fighting so uncomfortable, you can get them to quit eventually. It does not appear that the fundamentalism that fuels Al Queda et.al. will ever come to that conclusion. They do have the advantage that the american mindset has changed a bit since 1945 and they are obsessed with minimizing casualties on both sides but especially among “non-combatants”. Several million people in German and Japan did not have this benefit.

I wonder if these robots will be programmed to have this sort of ethos?

The only reason that more american soldiers have not been killed in the last 10 years is because of lower individual risk and huge advances in medicine. I doubt the average american would be so apathetic about the wars if every family had one or more gold stars in the window (per WW2).
The wars have lasted longer than vietnam did and have probably cost more (adjusted dollars + hiding cost/risk with contractors has much to do with the enormous amounts of spin involved in keeping these wars going for no reason.

Not only that, but killer-robot making creates jobs…

Pushing a button to allow a robot to push a button whenever it feels like it “should” will be a bad thing if for nothing else, it removes humanity from killing almost completely.   

Taking this sort of thinking to its logical (or illogical) end is it is like turning on a roomba and going on vacation.  You come back to a clean house, but don’t notice the damn thing terrorizing your cats for two weeks when it is not banging into every piece of furniture you have hundreds of times.

It does whatever it thinks it should and you get to enjoy the benefits without even thinking about the process much less getting your hands the least bit dirty.

oh yeah and it does a crappy job of sweeping too.