What's important to remember is that we get to Slaughterbots with "best intentions." Trying to feel safer. Trying to kill our enemies. Trying to protect our friends, families, children. Little by little is how it happens. The road to hell is paved, after all.

Slaughterbots is just the beginning; it's definitely too late to prevent that scenario now.

Why bother? For the same reason to bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with nuclear fireballs. Radioactive wastelands are unprofitable! This is a general problem with genocide: it only gets you land, and since the Green Revolution land is abundant. Protection rackets, on the otehr hand, are highly profitable, but only with some exclusivity; if extortionists multiply, the unique Nash equilibrium is multiple gangs that collectively demand many times the victims' total revenues, resulting in ecological collapse.

More generally, the threat of violence is only effective as a form of coercion when you can credibly withdraw the violence as a reward for compliance. Violence provides no incentive to comply to someone who believes they are just as likely to be a victim whether they comply or not.

But swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives are plausibly the most effective way to provide that surgical-assassination threat, perhaps combined with poisons, solid penetrators, and/or incendiaries. The Minority Report spiders (not yet technically feasible) or a quadcopter can be enormously more selective than a GBU-57, a Hellfire missile, or even a hand grenade, and can choose to avert their attack at the last millisecond upon the presentation of properly signed do-not-assassinate orders, even if long-distance communication is jammed.

>After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

Last two years? Try last few decades at the very least. People only care about the war in Gaza more because it's controversial. For non-controversial cases people just agree it's bad but shrug their shoulders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocide

It's sad that it was only months after that video was released that autonomous drones were being used to kill people in war. That video was meant as a warning but it was totally ignored.

> After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

And open war crimes like intentionally killing civilians (TV broadcasters in Iran for example, or Gaza en mass)

Does the US intelligence apparatus protect its networks with some kind of theurgy preventing the government of Russia or Iran from finding any 0-day before they do from time to time, and have a source of infallible humans immune to bribery or extortion?

If we're talking about cheap products, then it's more likely due to cost savings rather than malice. But yeah, no one can give you defitive proof of this.

Memory sure is short around here.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/

*its

There's also another point that security is really fucking expensive. Apple on Google spend billions a year on security, yet their phones are broken in to once they are a couple of years old. Big American software companies have large margins and large budgets. Those Chinese companies are running on fumes (and credit.)

Security and encryption is taken as a given by Western regulators given how many times they pass laws to break encryption. If you look at targeted 0-days, the conclusion would be more along the lines of the very best hardware+software is barely secure.

>>Brother you cannot be serious with this racist take

>There are many ethnicities in China, people of all genetic backgrounds. It is the culture that is the problem, not the race.

This just seems like nitpicking to me. Colloquially most people would classify discrimination based on country of origin, or "culture" (whatever that means) as racism, even if it doesn't meet the technical definition. For instance Trump's travel bans have been called by many as "racist", even though it covers a bunch of countries, and even though the countries are majority muslim, it also excludes major muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia.

Well, China is more on the side of Iran than the US or US allies. So there is that.

I meant my response specificly in the context of the post i was responding to - namely that Israel was tracking some high level officials and then bombing the building they were in - which is what i assume the parent was claiming was a war crime.

Other actions in this conflict of course could be crimes and require appropriate analysis.

> Since Israel started the war without authorization being the security council, it's legally the aggressor. Which means the actions in of themselves are crimes, regardless of where they are conducted.

I disagree with the way you phrased this. The analysis of if the use of force is legal in general should be separate from if individual actions are war crimes. See https://www.icrc.org/en/law-and-policy/jus-ad-bellum-and-jus... which emphasizes that jus ad bellum is separate from jus in bello.

Israel is probably going to claim self-defense here (you do not need UNSC permission for a defensive war). The claim is probably pretty far-fetched unless there is some bombshell evidence we are not privy to, as the threat does not seem imminent the way self-defense normally requires.

OTOH - the last time anyone cared about the crime of agression was germany in WW2 (although there are some voices about ukraine & russia). People tend to care much more about war crimes than crimes of aggression.

> Israel has hit hospitals in Tehran

I'm not aware of this allegation. I did hear an allegation from Iran about a hospital in Kermanshah. Regardless, if it is true, it would indeed probably be a war crime. (Generally speaking. Details do matter in these sorts of things)

> And condos

I think the analysis of this would require knowing what specificly was targeted. Generally of course, civilian housing is not an acceptable target, but if for example,it was housing for senior military leadership, that might change things.

> Now, one could object and say that Israel has to commit war crimes because it's so endangered.

If by war crime you mean commit "agression" (to be clear, the crime of agression is not a war crime. These are two separate categories of crimes), this would be an argument that the act is not "agression", since defensive wars are allowed to be done without UNSC approval. You only need UNSC approval if you are not facing an imininent threat.

> Who on the security council would vote against Israel if the threat was remotely real?

Security council is largely about geopolitics, and russia & iran are allies.

Palestine is a member and we all saw what happened there. The US has personally threatened the judges.