[brosefstalin]

Maybe because it's so impersonal to pilot a remote-controlled toy on a screen thousands of miles away that when you see little black and white pixels moving on your TV, you have less moral qualms about pushing the little red button on your joystick?

Maybe because you're so far away from that reality -- literally and figuratively -- that you're not experiencing your conscience and the fear of consequences quite the same way, making it easier to take reckless actions that you would otherwise think twice about had it been coming directly from the barrel of your gun, so to speak?

[Mithaldu]

Good question, but seriously, no.

You can actually test that hypothesis yourself very easily. Go look at some of the more gory scenes from Saw, or the Aliens movies. If you're like many typical internet people they won't even phase you. Now go and find some of the typical rotten.com / liveleak content and see how much you can stomach of that. Likely not a lot and not easily at all.

Knowing that something is real makes a MASSIVE difference.

Further, being on the ground with a gun, facing armed and active enemies² makes you more likely and less inhibited to recklessly kill people, because while there may be consequences to killing, the consequence to being killed is FAR greater.

Soldiers need to be trained to not go full auto with their rifles for a reason.

² Just a note to make clear that i edited that part in as clarification.

vvvv For one, that book doesn't seem to cover direct vs remote combat, which is the comparison i was making, and further: Read the reviews underneath.

[Spearchucker]

"...being on the ground with a gun makes you more likely and less inhibited..."

It's actually the exact opposite. Seeing the person you're about to kill makes it harder to pull the trigger (given a normal psychology, for whatever that's worth). If you're interested, the book linked to below goes into great detail about this.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0316040932/

[CHY872]

Yes, but historically armies have proved more than adept at drilling those instincts out of people.

[afarrell]

But a pilot of a manned aircraft has a limited, possibly zero time to observe the people in question. A pilot of an unmanned aircraft has a much longer time.

""" “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.” """ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-g...

[bane]

It's a good point, but it's also not clear if the experience is materially all that different from dropping a bomb from 30,000 ft.

The view from a Spectre gunship isn't materially all that different than from a drone operator's position. And there's quite a bit of evidence that drone operators do suffer similar psychological problems as in-theater operators.

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumati...

[mc32]

A drone pilot is apt to make fewer errors and more time to think before unloading. This removal from immediate reality is a double edged sword, there is less immediate harm to them but that also affords the remote pilot to consider things more coldly and calculatedly. There is more Tim to think before unloading, so that means fewer mistakes. When you have humanned aircraft, you get lots more collateral and unintended casualties.

People intrinsically have a problem with the clinicality of technological enhancement.

Imagine an algorithm which could tell a police force who is likely out to commit crimes given observed parameters (time, route, familiarity in area, vehicle, passengers, origin, destination, income, education, criminal history, etc) people would be freaked out. I'm sure some day well have this and people will wish for good old police walking the beat, mistakenly stopping the wrong person, but at least its not an impersonal algorithm targeting you.