Hello skynet...

[My375hp302]

This could be potentially very bad. A "smart" thinking drone with learning abilities armed to the teeth? What could go wrong?

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/03/29/marines-ultra-powerful-heavily-armed-mega-drone-will-devastate-enemies-us.html

[Mr. Snuffalupagus]

I don't hold with it...


I understand this could reduce American serviceman casualties, etc.
on the face of it - this is a good thing, but there are some caveats.

when you take the human factor out of war, and put it in the hands of a machine, to take away the accountability and human cost of waging war...what have we become?

if war becomes only costly in dollars and lost hardware, and not our boy's lives... what will the drawbacks to going to war really be? none that I can determine... and that is a little scary to me. the idea of UCAV Drone strikes never sat well with me, as effective as they can be... maybe its the idea of "what happens if the other side gets these things and starts dropping ordinance on downtown LA?"
payback is a *****...


see, right now (theoretically) you can look at the idea of going to war and say
"is this worth losing our men over?" if the answer is yes, then you do what you need to do... if the answer is "hell no" then you find another way to settle a dispute that doesn't require killing your people or theirs (not that some people don't need killing of course.)


with something like this? the answer is always going to be "who cares? - send the drone..." no letters to write to dependants if a drone gets destroyed, no flag draped caskets in the back of a C17. no call ups and mobilization of men. Hell, no one stateside will even be told we are doing something nasty in some other country

in a nutshell, such tools might just encourage the powers that be to do things we as a populace may not really approve of.

[tnlrat37]

And I assume they somehow make them hack proof, doubt it. It would really suck seeing them come right back to home base still fully loaded ready to do the enemies bidding.