http://www.npr.org/2011/12/19/143926857/report-high-levels-of-burnout-in-u-s-drone-pilots

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/asia/air-force-drone-operators-show-high-levels-of-stress.html?_r=0

What needs to change is the policy, as a species we are unlikely to stop finding new and better ways to kill each other anytime soon.

Stop blaming the weapon for the policy, remotely piloted drones are simply taking over the tasks we used to do with manned aircraft and missiles, only they do it more accurately.

They do it with fewer consequences for the person pressing the button. It makes a difference.

If soldiers were sent to a Taliban wedding to try and kill some high value target armed with rifles, they’d try very hard not to shoot women and children, or old men. Drone pilots just use a missile to kill everyone, then they go home and have themselves a good night sleep.  They simply don’t care, because they don’t have to experience what they’ve wrought.

That’s what creeps most people out about drones.  Against a drone we’ve been shorn of oue last defense against violence at the hands of the other, their empathy.

There no longer has to be a choice between firing and saving the pilot or not firing and potentially getting shot down.

Drones present a political problem in the sense that they make wars politically easy to get involved in, since the costs are small. However they are a massive improvement over older weapons in the amount of discretion given to the operators.

Potentially drones represent a massive step towards reducing the civilian cost of war because their extended loiter time allows the operators to observe a target for an extended period of time, meaning that it is a lot easier to know what one is shooting at.

This does not mean it is good policy to deploy them to a country to bomb anyone, you think might not like you, but that is a political problem. The US had previously done exactly the same thing with conventional weapons.

The Only thing drones did was make it easier to scale up an existing policy, ironically because they promised much less collateral damage. Of course when one uses them all the time one will still miss every so often, and that is what gets reported.

Now if you asked me there is no real reason the US should continue with drone strikes all over the world, it has become a foreign policy band-aid that, since it is cheap, is popular.
The same has been true for “limited” military actions since the end of the Cold War, the US, given the biggest military in the world and essentially unassailable borders decided to use this instrument to solve all it’s problems.
It’s not working so well but that has little to do with the weapons being used to carry out policy and much to do with the policy itself.

Don’t curse “drones” it lets the lazy strategists, who can’t come up with a plan to properly engage the world, off the hook.

Apologies for the rant, this is an issue that can get my blood up a bit.

Don’t complain about “drones” complain about the security policy that seems to find it necessary to constantly bomb people in faraway countries with no real agency. Otherwise you are simply obfuscating the real problem.

(With air canisters to prevent suffocation, and that way you’ve got a dynamic positive pressure containment suit too!)

(also, teddy bear herder would be the coolest job on the police force.)

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/27/peter-wattss-drone-ethics-st.html

1) it has a R&D testing cycle that never passes the laugh test.

2) it has a definition of murder that never passes the laugh test.(surgery is murder?)

3). it has amazingly badly designed autonomous drones with no off switches.

If you haven’t looked into the subject, maybe start here… http://livingunderdrones.org/

If you are not from the US, then the “we” doesn’t pertain to you and you are free to ignore it.

There is a human behind the controls.

A late-adolescent human. What could go wrong?

But for now, these are just remote controlled vehicles and I’m in favor of them if they protect pilots from harm and save money.

No problem burning women and children alive as long as the person who pushes the button is safe and it doesn’t cost too much.

Thoreau’s classification of those who serve the state comes to mind: “In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.” 

Right?  Right?  Right? You know?  Right?  See what I mean?  Right?  Right?  Right?  Yeah?  Right?  Right? Right?  Got it?  So xyz and abc, right?  Right?  Right?

Descent of the red curtain, and cue tranquil pastoral scene.

We have already deployed semi-autonomous drones under sea in a military capacity  http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140679-us-navy-finally-starts-replacing-killer-dolphins-with-mine-hunting-knifefish-drones

While we currently have humans behind the controls, we are spending huge piles of cash ($813 million on the X-47B alone) on perfecting fully autonomous drones. So complacency is not an option here. If you think we should not have fully autonomous drones, now is the time for that discussion, not after that have already been perfected.

If you’re not a U.S. taxpayer, more power to you.

SPOILER!

I say “what they consider to be a murder” because the “learning circuits” mentioned in the quote gradually expand the definition of “murder” to include the meat industry and then agriculture in general.  Of course we all know that a human bureaucracy would never fall into “mission creep” like that.  Well, not unless it gave them a bigger budget.

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

Whooboy is this a LOADED QUESTION… Forcing someone to say that a person is right/wrong is a very, very touchy thing to do… And usually the person asking it has an agenda for asking it.