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| Thread: Is it a bird or plane...it's |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · NEXT» |
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markkur
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Once upon a time
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posted February 21, 2015 02:44 PM |
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Is it a bird or plane...it's
No not Superman, it is a flock of Drones.
"The world's first drone circus is being planned in Amsterdam"
I am not linking because I detest this new direction of technology. Circus...what a good choice of words. Nab millions/billions to make stuff to hover over humans. It's just so War of the Worlds-ish.
Just wondering what other people here at HC think about the current development and use of robotic flying predator machines?
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Geny
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posted February 21, 2015 03:12 PM |
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It's a birdplane?
That being said, drones have been developed for years for military purposes. They have a multitude of military application and you can't really stop that. If someone finds ways to safely utilize drones for everyday needs, I say why not.
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artu
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posted February 21, 2015 04:33 PM |
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The drones are just tools, they dont have to be predators. I can think of many use for them, especially as the technology becomes cheaper and more available to everyone. (To give my classical example, a deck of playing cards was very expensive technology and only top notch aristocrats had them back in the day.)
Just to name a few perks:
- Search and rescue, especially in dangerous weather for pilots.
- Scientific research and documentary recording. BBC has lovely series that lets you see nature from high above, a lion herd attacking antilopes watched from high above is very different, drones can make such filming much cheaper.
- Traffic control, city maintenance etc.
- In distant future, they can patrol other planets and moons for data.
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Fauch
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posted February 21, 2015 06:38 PM |
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what does it tell about our societies that so many new technologies are first developped for military purposes?
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artu
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posted February 21, 2015 06:46 PM |
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That's quite an old story actually, melting metal, chariots, roads of Rome, even the internet was developed for military.
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mvassilev
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posted February 21, 2015 10:04 PM |
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Imagine a future in which pizza gets delivered to your house by drone - you don't have to wait for your pizza delivery guy who gets stuck in traffic. That alone is a strong case for drones.  However, one of the main objections to drones is specifically to drone warfare - but the problem there isn't the "drone" part, it's the "warfare" part.
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OhforfSake
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posted February 21, 2015 11:13 PM |
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You don't think the drone would get stuck in uncleared air space sectors once they're so plentiful? 
Joke aside, creativity is a good thing. How the product is used determines what is moral.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 02:21 AM |
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Edited by artu at 09:55, 22 Feb 2015.
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OhforfSake said:
You don't think the drone would get stuck in uncleared air space sectors once they're so plentiful?
I'm still in shock how they manage to do this without even a fender bender every day.
(Btw, when you look at Middle Africa or Northern Asia, you can really see how geography is still a big deal despite all the technology. We still want comfortable land.)
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blizzardboy
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posted February 22, 2015 04:26 AM |
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mvassilev said:
Imagine a future in which pizza gets delivered to your house by drone - you don't have to wait for your pizza delivery guy who gets stuck in traffic. That alone is a strong case for drones. However, one of the main objections to drones is specifically to drone warfare - but the problem there isn't the "drone" part, it's the "warfare" part.
Not entirely. I think it's a very fair argument to say that the more humanly detached warfare becomes (that is, pushing buttons from a distance and letting missiles and automatons do the work), the more dangerous it becomes in theory, because brutal as it may sound, the human price of war is a very empathetic, visceral deterrent from continuing in it.
Not that I'm holding my breath for the world not to further develop drone technology. That is inevitable and inescapable, and the technology will serve a vast multitude of positive functions, but the increased human detachment from military involvement is going to be one of the dragons to overcome in the 21st century.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 05:10 AM |
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Edited by artu at 09:56, 22 Feb 2015.
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The main problem with drones (at least as of now, they may improve in the future) is that while they reduce the loss of life of pilots (soldiers) on their side, they increase civilian loss on the other side.
But even if they improve, the detachment you speak of will still be an issue. But I think modern warfare is already quite "computer game-like" in many aspects even without the drones. Do you think a jet pilot pushing a button and sending rockets to miles below feels much different than a man controlling a drone from an operating room?
I remember listening to a conference of Chomsky and he was even preferring mandatory military service to a professional army, since normal people who serve wouldn't see killing as normal as professional soldiers who's occupation is to terminate.
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fred79
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posted February 22, 2015 05:26 AM |
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artu said:
Do you think a jet pilot pushing a button and sending rockets to miles below feels much different than a man controlling a drone from an operatimg room?
i would think the jet pilot would feel a greater rush.
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OhforfSake
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posted February 22, 2015 03:50 PM |
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In regards to warfare, my issue is that humans are targeted, because humans aren't the threat anymore, it's what a human can do with the given weapon. It doesn't only apply to warfare, take a more simple case of a mad gunman, mainly it's the gunman who ends up getting shot, but imagine if in stead of the gunman, his weapons, such as guns or knives on his body, could be targeted. Then he would still be dangerous, but not so dangerous that he'd to be shot outright.
My thought is that currently war is fought by targeting some major goals, either factories or humans and very little already produced machinery (unless you insert land troops I suppose). But if war was fought machine vs. machine until one side had no weapons left, the "obvious" victor would be the side that still had weapons.
One bad point of this would likely mean war could stretch out indefinitely, but on the plus side, perhaps most casualties could be avoided, depending on how well this could be done.
artu said:
(Btw, when you look at Middle Africa or Northern Asia, you can really see how geography is still a big deal despite all the technology. We still want comfortable land.)
Something else I found interesting is how the rate of traffic changed with daylight.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 03:55 PM |
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That's probably because of the passengers, not the flying. Would you buy a plane ticket in the middle of the night for a two hour flight?
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OhforfSake
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posted February 22, 2015 03:59 PM |
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Agreed, the airlines probably decides frequencies of travel based on how many passengers they expect needs to be moved over a given time frame. But it also depends on direction (east to west, or west to east) if I saw correctly.
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blizzardboy
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posted February 22, 2015 10:23 PM |
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artu said:
The main problem with drones (at least as of now, they may improve in the future) is that while they reduce the loss of life of pilots (soldiers) on their side, they increase civilian loss on the other side.
But even if they improve, the detachment you speak of will still be an issue. But I think modern warfare is already quite "computer game-like" in many aspects even without the drones. Do you think a jet pilot pushing a button and sending rockets to miles below feels much different than a man controlling a drone from an operating room?
I remember listening to a conference of Chomsky and he was even preferring mandatory military service to a professional army, since normal people who serve wouldn't see killing as normal as professional soldiers who's occupation is to terminate.
There's a documentary called "That Which I Love Destroys Me" (a very old Latin proverb, "Me Destruit Quod Amo") that shows at the end that the rate of U.S. veterans committing suicide was every 65 minutes.
In WW2, which involved a far larger pool of manpower, you ironically had less PTSD. Admittedly part of this was that it was far more taboo for men to discuss mental & emotional struggles in the 1940s and so it went largely undocumented, but also the average tour of duty was only 2-4 months (for other countries this could have been far longer and led to more prevalent PTSD) and more importantly, you generally only had one tour of duty. With the sustained presence in Afghanistan/Iraq for such a long period of time, you had this psychologically traumatizing situation where a soldier would go on a 6 month tour of duty, be home for 6 months... go to war for 6 months.... go home for 6 months. They explained that it was like having this switch flipped on inside of you, where you suddenly become the ever-alert predator that humans used to be (and had to be) on a regular basis so many ages ago. Once you went home, you weren't able to flip that switch off. There's thousands of guys that voluntarily went back to Iraq/Afghanistan as a form of stress relief, because they felt more comfortable in a combat situation.
I'm unsure what my view is on standing army versus professional army, but a professional army definitely has an unforeseen price tag attached in the long-term if you're going to end up using it. You're packing all of the burden of war onto a very select group of people in society, and many in that group develop a peculiar addiction to it.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 11:17 PM |
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blizzardboy
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posted February 22, 2015 11:34 PM |
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Professional armies can definitely get the job done. The big controversial policy of Alexander the Macedonian is that he used up the considerable quantity of wealth the Hellenist States had generated in order to switch to an actual professional army versus spontaneously raising up an army when it was needed. That's how Greece was able to crush the Persian threat and then move straight to Iran to finish the job; you train a smaller but elite force and then sheer apart the random laborers that the enemy is using for warriors.
There's also a hidden cost attached when you just make random guys (and possibly girls) from your populace to waste X months of their life in the army when they could be doing other things, as opposed to consolidating it to a volunteer, professional army.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 11:38 PM |
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I think there would be too many parameters to check that on your list as a formula guaranteed to deliver.
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blizzardboy
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posted February 22, 2015 11:41 PM |
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The topic could fill volumes, but the point being: professional armies are good at what they do. That's not necessarily a good thing, but there it is.
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artu
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posted February 22, 2015 11:55 PM |
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Well, if it's a matter of survival, there are examples of service based armies having advantages also. They are cheaper and therefore more crowded, if the soldiers believe in some cause, there is higher moral, solidarity and potential of self-sacrifice. Every nation has stories about heroic defenses of vastly outnumbered patriots etc. They are usually a little bit overblown but they are not completely fiction.
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