So, here's the nasty undercurrent to all this, right?<p>Drone warfare (whether by land, sea, or air) is about using disposable machines to kill and injure human beings. Engineering dictates that we'll eventually optimize away the part of the control system that is slowest and most prone to failure: the people.<p>The discussion of "How can we keep people running the robots" is uninteresting, because the entire deck is stacked to guarantee that it will be rendered moot.<p>~<p>The real discussion--I posit--is somewhat darker and more chilling:<p>In order to field a drone army, you need capital. You need factories to build the devices, you need command and control infrastructure to deploy them, and you need bright minds to develop them. Drone warfare is difficult to conduct in any meaningful fashion as a third-world nation, or more importantly <i>as a populace in rebellion</i>.<p>To put it bluntly, the use of these engines of war is limited only to the rich kids, and there is no chance for appeal or mercy when you are identified as a target.<p>Think about that for a second.<p>The wealthy murderer who decides to unleash these does so without any skin in the game, without any chance of dealing with repercussions back home for lost sons and daughters, without any care whatsoever except for a line-item expense. Stubborn rebel holdout? Spin up more terminators the same way we spin up dynos to deal with spikes in load.<p>The teenage kid holding the rusted AK their parent just dropped, looking at the robot which just made them an orphan? No chance in hell that they'll be spared because they are obviously not a threat--they are a human wielding an automatic rifle, p = .975, execute.<p>~<p>This whole thing needs to become verboten, forbidden, the same way we nominally treat chemical and biological weapons.<p>If we support our .gov and .mil in the use of these weapons, we'll be doing everyone a disservice, and come the day we decide to rescind the support which backs those bastards, we'll find that they no longer need our support for they already have the drones and the capital to make their whims felt.