Christian Democrats in the United States

Tuesday, August 4, 2009 3:52 PM

debate on killer robots, but not about killing?

It's an infinitesimally small glimmer of hope that someone in the US military is trying to talk about putting the brakes on automatic death machines, to communicate to the boardroom idiots that their ideas "artificial intelligence" are based on science fiction, that automatic death drones cannot distinguish good from bad, and that trying to put this decision on a robot is a psychotic, cowardly cop-out to distance one's self from the act, to deny responsibility for murder. And it forces an arms race of robots, invisible robots, robots to detect the invisible ones, robots to interfere with those robots, robots to maintain and re-arm the other robots, etc. I don't know about you but I have better things to do with the tax money that line of thinking will yoke me and the whole world into for the next five hundred years. The Dude said, his yoke is light.

But it's more telling that it seems controversial to a lot of people that such a debate might take place. It makes all the more remote the possibility that we could debate whether war itself is legitimate, that we could debate not only automatic killing but killing itself. And anyone who stands up and says the whole damn idea of war is an antiquated, outmoded symptom of genetic throwbacks, of a primitive or damaged mind, is framed by the self-sacrificed slaves of the machine to be a traitor, when it is they who seek not to kill anyone in particular, but to kill everyone in their path.

Between January 2006 and April 2009, [Prof. Sharkey] estimated, 60 such "drone" attacks were carried out in Pakistan. While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred, he said.

That kind of behavior reminds me of a story a while back that a man lost a bet on a cock fight in Jalisco Mexico and in anger tossed a hand-grenade into the crowd of spectators, killing eight people at random.

It's the stupor of a mad bomber, made drunk by killing and enflamed with a desire to see the whole world die. It's wrong, and it always will be wrong, whether the target is selected by a person or by a computer.

Meanwhile in Germany Angela Merkel is visited by a ghost from her past, a weapons dealer friend-of-friends who armed Saudi Arabia and stole from them. I don't know about you but it seems rather un-christian to sell guns and bombs and then steal from the people paying you... all that stuff is not how I choose to fill my day in any case.

But this guy Karlheinz Schreiber only went to jail for fraud. This distracts us from the larger irony of the label "Christian Democrats" used to promote the industrialization of murder from Arabia to Persia and to fill the tinderbox to the brim with bombs in the Holy Land. It makes it more palatable for the public, etc. that "Glock doesn't kill people, it's the dang A-rabs who kill people," though Schreiber plays the "ali baba" role in that drama parallel to the Iran-Contra sales of Reagan, Cheney, North etc. in the 1980's.

We get so tied up in going after their fall guys that we forget about the bigger problem, that these wars are being fought in the first place and that the bulk of the sale of arms to the third world bears the official stamp of our wealthy governments.

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