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350 points tepidandroid | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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zxcvbn4038 ◴[] No.21024866[source]
Notice the wording - the drone targeted the workers. The drone didn’t make a decision and target the workers, the drone pilot targeted the workers, and whomever was standing behind them gave the order to launch the missle. The whole “I’m just doing what the computer said” defense only works in movies.
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igravious ◴[] No.21024939[source]
Imagine being the person (even if you had little personal autonomy in the matter) who pulled the trigger or pressed the button. Imagine finding out what you had done. Would it break you?
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1. ryanmercer ◴[] No.21026396[source]
There's a reason they are sitting in trailers half a world away operating the drones usually. Detachment. You're looking at a grainy image, from altitude, on a monitor many time zones away.

Even being in a conventional aircraft you are largely removed from the situation because you are thousands (or tens of thousands) of feet above your target and any individual is an unrecognizable speck that your weapon system strikes after you're already well past your target.

This is a problem, for society, with modern warfare. You can sit a mile away and 'paint' a target with IR for someone else to fire a missile with, or you can call in on your radio coordinates and have artillery take out your target from even farther away, or you can effectively emulate a video game and drop a bomb on a few pixels in Afghanistan while sitting in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada. You can wage war without ever having to see the face of the enemy, you strip the enemy of their humanity making it easier to kill.

I imagine some drone operators struggle with severe depression but I imagine it's generally less than an infantrymen that was in CQB firefights in Ramadi or Fallujah or a trench in WWI.

Modern warfare allows us to be cold and calculating, it allows us to pause our humanity. It's good for a military but it's bad for civilization.