Open Thread: March 2010, part 2

RobinZ

The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has exceeded 500 comments – new Open Thread posts may be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has exceeded 500 comments – new Open Thread posts may be made here.

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

This is ironic. I wrote:

It's some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where "our guys" are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get...

Then you wrote:

...an obvious way to make things better for everyone involved. Fewer American casualties because we're using robots, and fewer civilian casualties because the robots are better at not shooting at civilians.

This happens to pixel-perfectly demonstrate my point about ethical blindness. Reread my quote again, then your quote, then mine, then yours again. Notice anything wrong? Anything missing?

You see, you omitted one pretty important group: everyone America calls "enemy combatants". If you think all of them are bad people and deserve to die, then you obviously don't get it. Repeat after me: America Starts Aggressive Wars. Then say it again because it's true and truth won't suffer from repetition. Say it as many times as you need to make it sink in, then come back and we will resume this discussion.

America Starts Aggressive Wars

Also, this is definitely not the place to debate this, and you have to know a lot of people won't agree with you, so stop with the flamebait.

7thomblake16y

America will be killing those people with or without robots. We already have ways of wiping all of the enemy combatants off the map if we want to (for example nukes). Military technology is primarily about finding ways to 1) kill fewer of our own soldiers and 2) kill fewer people who aren't enemy combatants.