[nickff]

I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.

[saltcured]

Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.

I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.

On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.

Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.

Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.

Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.

[blitzar]

The gulf war (1991) tv broadcasts of cruise missiles 100 feet above the road sure look(ed) a lot like autonomous drones on their way to killed humans to me.

[readthenotes1]

Wasn't it just flying to a particular GPS, coordinate and exploding? That's quite a bit different than flying to an area and killing anything that moves...

[jandrewrogers]

It depends on the system. Some modern systems can react to high-value targets of opportunity, hunt for targets, or switch to a new target if the one they are after is destroyed before they get there. There are different variants of the weapons to deal with different use cases. The 1990s versions were relatively limited though.

Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.

[asdff]

I would hope it is. The fact it is even possible for a friendly system to lock onto another friendly system and fire upon it seems like a pretty big damn issue to engineer around. I guess they still haven't though considering kuwait shot down an f15 a couple months ago. You'd think lockheed or raytheon would have figured something clever out to solve this half a century ago.

[nickff]

This is a solved problem, and IFF was invented in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe

It is believed that the Kuwaiti aircraft did not have its IFF transponder turned on (IFF is and has always been standard equipment on the F-18).

[asdff]

Clearly the problem isn't solved if people are still getting friendly fired.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Gulf war tomahawks didn't use GPS. They flew on terrain following radar (over Iran to improve accuracy), inertial reference, and image correlation for the final phase of attack.

[nickff]

Some cruise missiles have the ability to detect targets based on camera or infra-red match; on the other side, most (currently-deployed) drone types have at most that same capability. I believe that most of the infamous Shahed long-range drones that Russia has launched against Ukraine have been entirely inertial or satellite navigation based, with no independent re-targeting capability.

[machomaster]

Correct. The capability you describe came only recently and only a small part of Shaheds have it.

[TomasBM]

The difference is in "active"/intelligent versus "passive"/dumb targetting that's performed by the machine.

The missile, once fired, has the general vicinity (if not the exact position) of the target and is armed by the operator. Therefore, the operator is fully accountable for the targetting. Same goes for the landmines, once placed. Hitting civilians is reckless at best, and negligent at worst.

An autonomous weapon system (AWS) usually means that the system, once deployed, can do the targetting itself over any arbitrarily bounded location. An AWS can continue finding targets as long as its hardware allows it. For kamikaze drones, it's one time; for other drones, the ammunition & battery are the limits.

We currently rely on human targetting because we assume that A) humans are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets "well-enough", and if not, B) at least we can hold them accountable (e.g., punish them for war crimes).

An AWS provides a layer of plausible deniability: the operator can claim that the system wasn't developed well enough, while the developer can claim that it wasn't used as intended. Given the inscrutability of modern computational intelligence - i.e., visual-action neural networks - this could potentially lead to very worrying incidents.

From a technical POV, the difference between a manually operated drone and an AWS drone may not be massive. From a military POV, it's just another legal lethal tool in the arsenal.

But from a social/civilian POV, the use of AWS is still 'not normal' and opens a can of worms. Targetting while evading counterattacks and crimes successfully is a bottleneck for manual operation. That's no longer the case with AWS: build 20 thousand drones, for example, and you can trivially win by overwhelming any manual defense of frontlines or cities. And knowing the history of human warfare, winning can range from relatively bloodless regime changes to utter destruction of the loser's civilization.

So, the best outcome is similar to nuclear deterrence or MAD: as long as everyone has 20 thousand AWS drones, they're safe.

[sarchertech]

> Same goes for the landmines, once placed.

Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.

Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.

[ordinaryradical]

> Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time.

Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.

With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?

But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.