[kragen]

Land mines have been killing people by surprise for decades. Flying drones, some of them dropping land mines and others lying in wait for incoming convoys, produced 70% of the casualties on both sides in the Ukrainian invasion last year, and a few weeks ago the Ukrainians shipped some drones to near a Russian airport several thousand kilometers from Ukraine to blow up a bunch of airplanes. This betokens a future of borderless warfare in which probably most of your family members will be killed over the next few decades, by one or another type of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous weapon.

CARA is a super cool project which is never going to kill anybody, but it's another piece of evidence that the cost of the technology for such weapons has decreased enormously.

That said, talking about the dread is going to get boring fast, because nearly every story on the HN front page is catapulting us toward that future.

[scotty79]

I'm more optimistic. I think filling battlefields with autonomous weapons will make humans obsolete there and reduce war causalities. Basically any attack on humans is going to be a war crime and terrorism akin to attacks on civilians russia is doing right now

[kragen]

Well, suppose you have two countries at war, say, Burnia and Hevonia. They each produce a million autonomous weapons.

Burnia sends their million autonomous weapons to kill the million people they judge are most crucial to Hevonia's war effort, prioritizing Hevonia's political leadership and military officers.

Hevonia, meanwhile, sends their million autonomous weapons to destroy Burnia's autonomous weapons, when they can find them, but not to attack any humans.

Who wins the war?

I think Burnia does, because even if Hevonia's weapons are 99% effective, Hevonia's government has still lost its top ten thousand people, including all of their military officers, while Burnia has only lost half a billion dollars. That's going to make it impossible for Hevonia to keep fighting. And I think 50% effective is more likely.

[scotty79]

It's the same question as when one opponent is ready to nuke enemy cities while the other is not. In theory everything turns out the same way you postulate. In practice cost of winning the war in this manner might be higher then the cost of losing localized, limited conflict.

[kragen]

That's why there's never been a war between two nuclear-armed countries: everybody is shitting in their pants because of exactly that logic. Presumably we'll find out when the PRC invades Taiwan.

However, if that doesn't end up with a radioactive wasteland, we'll probably find out shortly afterwards what happens when every two-bit drug cartel or extortion mafia can cheaply assassinate anyone, anywhere in the world, with an ambush drone.

[scotty79]

> However, if that doesn't end up with a radioactive wasteland, we'll probably find out shortly afterwards what happens when every two-bit drug cartel or extortion mafia can cheaply assassinate anyone, anywhere in the world, with an ambush drone.

I wonder what's stopping them right now. They used drones to smuggle drugs already.

[kragen]

Ignorance. More specifically, diffusion of innovations.

[lazide]

That is a really weird take considering how hard Russia (and Ukraine) work to continue to kill humans in the same situation you are describing.

[kragen]

Who cares if it's weird? Why are you saying "weird" as if that were a bad thing? It's just a derogatory synonym for "unusual". A take would have to be weird to be a contribution to the conversation, because if it's not weird, it's a widely held opinion we all already know, and nobody gains anything by reading it.

What matters, given that it meets the minimal bar of weirdness to be potentially worthwhile, is whether it's correct. Which depends on what future combatants will do once weaponry actually is autonomous, not what Ukraine and Russia are doing with remotely-piloted FPV drones.

[numpad0]

I'd call it delusional than weird. US is clearly controlling Ukrainian churn rate so that Russian military and Ukraine as nation burn down at the same rate into disappearance so that the postwar Ukraine can be rebuilt with more Western leaning meatbags from surrounding nations. And some of people here are framing exactly that as utopian bloodless fights of machines. Calling it weird is itself almost weird.

[scotty79]

Never attribute to malice something that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It's true that US restrains Ukrainians and the war drags on but US does this out of fear of nuclear war with russia. It's silly, but you have to understand that US for many decades built up the marketing myth of russia as a scary superpower. Only in opposition to this great and strong evil they could see themselves as the great and strong good. To facilitate this they told everyone that russia is strong boogyman so much that they themselves believed it and can't shake off this belief even though russia repeatedly displays how weak and terrible at everything it is.

[scotty79]

I think we are in transition period and nations are just learning that sending people to contact line is a terrible idea. People never learned things like that very fast. It often takes a generation.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

Good point. If we do press panic button each time, the word will lose its meaning. Naturally, it does not help that this particular community did happen to catapult us towards the future a fair bit over the past years.

[imtringued]

> This betokens a future of borderless warfare in which probably most of your family members will be killed over the next few decades, by one or another type of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous weapon.

You're talking about a whole bunch of targeted and intentional attacks in a literal warzone, the most lawless kind of place on the planet and you're complaining that they are hitting their intended military targets?

Meanwhile Gaza is boring to you, because Israel uses conventional bombs with humans in the loop, even though the collateral damage matches your prediction today.

[kragen]

I'm not complaining, exactly; I'd rather the Ukrainians be blowing up Russian planes, which were thousands of kilometers from the literal warzone, than the Russians blowing up Ukrainian planes thousands of kilometers away.

I'm saying that the events we're seeing in the Ukrainian war are convincing evidence that the nature of war has changed, and the implications of that change for human society are disquieting.

For two million years, people have often resolved conflicts by warfare. But that warfare, though it has never ended completely, has always been localized, which meant that most places most of the time were peaceful.

This is the foundation of the system of international relations in which different states exercised monopolies of legitimate violence over geographical territories: by so doing, they could prevent warfare and provide security. This system has existed to one extent or another for thousands of years.

Warfare is no longer localized, so now the only place for anywhere to be peaceful will be for everywhere to be peaceful. It is no longer possible for states to provide security to the people within their borders. Consequently statehood itself has lost its meaning. The last time we saw such a change in the nature of warfare was twelve thousand years ago when the first states arose.

I have some corrections for you about other things that you did not understand either about my comment or about the wars we are commenting on.

It bears repeating that the planes blown up in Operation Spiderweb were not in a literal warzone, nor anywhere close to a literal warzone. Some of them were thousands of kilometers from the literal warzone, in a part of Russia that has China and Mongolia between it and Ukraine.

The Ukrainians reportedly did have humans in the loop for that attack in particular, and both the Ukrainians and the Russians are mostly using FPV drones rather than autonomous drones of any sort at this point, unless we count landmines as "autonomous drones". In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM Russian drone developer Sergey Tovkach specifically says that Starlink is the reason Ukrainian sea drones have established control of the Black Sea — Russia could build sea drones but does not have an equivalent to Starlink, so evidently both Ukraine and Russia are dependent on remote piloting for their sea drones. He also says Starlink's latency is too high for piloting quadcopters. (Evidently Operation Spiderweb used the Russian cellphone network.)

The Israeli attacks are also using precision-guided weaponry and (in some sense) AI, not conventional bombs, and they're killing lots of innocent people, but you're right that it's less worrisome to me, for three reasons:

- The total number of people they're killing is about an order of magnitude smaller, about 80,000 so far (out of a total of 2.1 million Gazans), versus roughly a million in the invasion of Ukraine. Many more civilians have been killed in Gaza, but both Russia and Ukraine practice conscription, so it's not as if the soldiers being killed are only or even mostly volunteers; they were civilians until being, in many cases, conscripted.

- The weapons Israel are using are mostly very expensive, which limits the number of people they can afford to kill with them. By contrast, the drones being mass-produced in both Ukraine and Russia cost only a few hundred dollars each, and each country is expected to produce about 3 million of them this year.

- The people Israel are killing are almost entirely in close geographical proximity to Israel. Gaza City is 80 km from Jerusalem. Beirut, the residence of many of the Hizbullah personnel that Israel killed with explosive charges in pagers (along with, in several cases, their children), is 230 km from Jerusalem.

Therefore, while Israel's war is clearly causing terrible suffering to millions of innocent people, and it could easily spiral into a Third World War, it does not represent the advent of a new, borderless mode of warfare in which the cost of untraceably killing a precision-targeted human anywhere in the world is similar to the cost of a small air conditioner or 20 kg of beef.

The developments we are seeing of the mode of war in the Ukrainian invasion do represent such a transition, and that is true regardless of how the conflict goes. But mostly it is not the Ukrainians and Russians who are responsible for the transition; it was an inevitable result of developments in batteries, motors, power electronics, and 3-D printing and (more broadly) digital fabrication.

What will the new equilibrium look like, now that statehood is effectively meaningless? Well, it might be better or it might be worse, but not many people currently alive will live long enough to find out.