I am new on this forum and I hope that I am welcome here.
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I just read the following comment on an article about AI drones:
(2021) 'Murderbot' Is Not Your Typical AIVery well, let's talk about how drones are being used "in the real world" in the current wars. The UN has not authorized US military action anywhere. The Congress has not declared war. They are not wars of self-defense. So the wars against al Qaeda, ISIS, and whoever else the president thinks is an enemy are illegal. Therefore, any killings of anybody by US drones in the Middle East or anywhere else are murders. Debates about whether drones are morally preferable to bombings are irrelevant in the current circumstances (sure, they are morally preferable to using nuclear weapons or carpet bombing; so what?). The President of the United States, therefore, has committed the ultimate international crime, aggression, the same crime for which Nazis were convicted. Unless you think the President is above the law, as Nixon decreed, you cannot avoid the conclusion that Barack Obama, the President of Drone Warfare, is a serial killer.
Of course, this is unthinkable and unsayable in polite company and in the mainstream media. As philosophers, however, we can think it, we can say it, and we are right.
https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/eth ... ne-warfare (The Ethics of Drone Warfare)
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05 ... rtha-wells
(2021) The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons
“Lethal autonomous weapons cheap enough that every terrorist can afford them are not in America's national security interest,” says Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that opposes autonomous weapons.
Tegmark says AI weapons should be “stigmatized and banned like biological weapons.” The NSCAI report's opposition a global ban is a strategic mistake, he says: “I think we'll one day regret it even more than we regret having armed the Taliban.”
https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-in ... l-weapons/
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I once read an article on Scientific American in which scientists argued that many terrorists are driven by factors such as the necessity to fight for water, and that instead of war, an alternative option could be to provide solutions to countries, to create friendships.
The potential validity of this idea is visible in recent articles on water crisis:
(2020) Water Crisis, A Bigger Threat Than Terrorism
https://dailytimes.com.pk/666539/water- ... terrorism/
(2019) Water Wars: How Scarcity Exacerbates Conflict
“Providing these needs will have a great effect on people, and will make them sympathize with us and feel that their fate is tied to ours.”
https://theowp.org/water-wars-how-scarc ... -conflict/
This may indicate that there are alternatives to warfare.
Another comment on PhilosophyTalk.org:
As it appears, innocent people including children are being targeted.There is no greater example of mental weakness than the idea that military technology and might is the solution to war. It is this very weakness that fuels our wars. Violence begets violence and nothing more.
Killing children to retaliate
As for the killing of “enemy” children, President Obama justified the murder of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in October 2011, two weeks after the assassination of his father, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president, he authorized a U.S. special operations attack that killed Abdulrahman’s 8-year old sister Nawar and other family members in January 2017 – after Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to kill the families of suspected terrorists.
Retaliation, and especially by means of killing children, would seem like an emotional act rather than a reasonable act. Would it be possible that such an act would serve to prevent terrorism? Are relatives of the killed children less motivated to perform terrorism?
Motive for terrorism: self-defense (violence begets violence)
Researchers have interviewed people who have joined armed resistance groups in countries across the world to ask them about what drove them to join an armed group and take part in guerrilla warfare or terrorism. In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled, The People’s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict. One of its main findings was that, “The most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.”
If most of the people fighting U.S. forces and their allies across the world, from Niger to Ukraine to the Philippines, are just trying to defend themselves and their families against our “counterterrorism” operations, that turns the whole basis of the U.S. “war on terror” on its head. The most effective way to reduce violence and terrorism would obviously be to stop putting them in such an intolerable position in the first place.
Across the world, it is obvious, and now well-documented, that U.S. aggression and militarism are causing the very problems they claim to be trying to solve.
(2017) America’s Renegade Warfare Killing Civilians, Violating Law
https://popularresistance.org/americas- ... ating-law/
What would happen when AI would be used to perform killing, for an idea, to retaliate or for ethnic cleansing?
As it appears, ethnic cleansing is a practice for which AI drones could potentially be used.
U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have killed at least 10-15 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and displaced about half of them. Sunni Arabs have been relentlessly targeted for detention, torture and summary execution since 2004. This ethnic cleansing campaign has continued under the U.S-backed Shiite government and has kept driving Sunni Arab Iraqis into armed resistance groups, creating pretexts for endless violence against them.
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What is your opinion on AI warfare?