Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
15hr ago
Well, sure, you can tell me that my right-wing position is wrong by picking contradictory arguments that I haven't made, and then generalize from that to right-wingers in general. You can posit that immigration cannot possibly be bad because of logical reasons and that even right-wingers know this, as made evident through their revealed preferences. You can even argue that the left in general is soundly grounded in reality. Then we need to conclude that right-wingers are illogical and wrong and shouldn't be believed.
And then I'm left with either of the following scenarios:
- The epistemic gulf between us is so vast we can't even communicate our axioms by messenger pigeon.
- I'm an abject idiot and not worth talking to, why haven't you blocked me yet?
- You fail the ideological turing test very hard.
But seriously now. Some points to argue about:
- The post you replied to described behaviors that I absolutely have seen from the left and the right, from numerous people, IRL as well as online. Leftists and rightists do in fact both do this. This is orthogonal to whether you believe that either side has the better arguments.
- Anti-immigration arguments do not hinge exclusively on "muh jobs" and Trump is not the avatar of all right-wing thought. And even if that were the case - there are more than enough similarly bad and contradictory arguments made on the left. There has been more than enough spotlight on those on The Motte.
- The portion of what you call "extreme bubbles" on the left isn't just very large but also disproportionately influential, and was able to shape public discourse with very little resistance in many spaces, including American academia and Europe in general until very recently (assuming "peak woke" has been passed). This is obviously hard to measure and easy to dispute, so deny it if you will, but with how far left the Overton Window has been in the past ten or so years I find it very obvious that the leftist fringe has been relatively close to the mainstream, and was able to exert far greater influence, compared to its right-wing equivalents.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
17hr ago
Fair point, good input.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20hr ago
Fair. But what is the ideal way for a practical egoist to deal with Alzheimer's?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
20hr ago
The dream of Richard Gatling, realized at last? Maybe to some extent.
Autonomous drones will still be tasked with killing people, will have false positives in identifying targets, will sometimes attack large areas with a high probability of collateral damage. And as @BreakerofHorsesandMen said, they may be used just as well to effectively carry out variably-discriminate mass killings.
OTOH, like precision-guided munitions reduced the usage of carpet bombing campaigns, the ability to use drone strikes precisely tailored to a given target may also work to reduce collateral damage like you say.
We'll see.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21hr ago
Fair points.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21hr ago
Thanks.
What about EMPs?
As mentioned, this might be possible. AFAIK - which isn't very far, I'm just an armchair theorist with a very cursory knowledge of physics and engineering - meaningful EMP requires some pretty big explosions to generate, so you can't just sustainably deny a large area. Even assuming that someone will invent a sustainable, powerful large-area EMP, then it will only delay the development towards ubiquitous, scalable, autonomous drone swarms. EMP hardening through metallic shielding will make drones heavier, slower, more expensive and easier to spot and target, but they will still be exceedingly useful and powerful and nobody will be able to afford not using them.
I'd expect hardened and unhardened drones to be used simultaneously. You deploy both, assuming that enemy will probably not use EMP, but just in case they do you have the hardened drones to continue the mission if the unhardened one should get fried. If they do not, then the cheaper and more agile unhardened ones can complete the mission while the more expensive and cumbersome hardened ones hang back and don't risk themselves.
EMP also comes with the caveat that, well, EMP doesn't discriminate. You will shut down your own unhardened electronics as well as the enemy's if you use it. So it becomes necessary either to employ a lot of hardening, which is expensive and heavy, or to accept that EMP is a weapon of last resort that will harm yourself, or somehow synchronize the EMP with a sort of hunker-down protocol of your own drones in which they retreat into prepared shelters before the pulse and reemerge after. The latter obviously doesn't work for stationary electronics.
And in the very long run, who knows, someone might just develop hardware that doesn't rely on classical electronics at all. I absolutely expect someone to grow organic CPUs at some point.
Or strikes at drone control centers?
Drone Control Centers are a relic of our transitional age, in which you need a horde of humans to babysit a small number of drones that they manually control in real-time. The drone "control center" of the future will be a command-and-control drone flying slightly behind the frontline drones. At most you will have, let's call them "drone doctrine programming centers" sitting safely at home, in which the missions and rules of engagement are defined before being handed off to the drones themselves. EMP may not be viable as a general countermeasure to drones, but jamming is already used to great effect - but radio jamming can at most prevent drones from communicating, not from operating autonomously. This massively reduces the value of real-time manual drone control (as done today), while the autonomous drones of the near future are only affected in their ability to share information with each other (via radio; other means still work) while retaining the ability to operate individually.
The gist of all this is that there will be no sufficently good reason to have big control centers in one place in striking distance of the enemy. Maybe some operations will require a human operator to observe through the drones' eyes as far as possible to make judgement callls, but I'd guess that those will be increasingly rare as more and more authority is transferred to the drones themselves for reasons of practicality and scalability.
I broadly agree with your linked post. But I think the damper that drone warfare puts on power projection (conflating this with interventionism for now) is only temporary. Big miltiary bases won't be necessary for gunboat diplomacy when the drones are smart enough to deploy themselves from shipping containers, or fired to the target location via cruise missile, or just creeping from home to there on solar power. And if boots on the ground are strictly required, then it's still our drones versus their drones. Drone-on-drone warfare will be a thing, and I find it entirely conceivable that you will have military bases surrounded by dozens of miles of drone-patrolled perimeter, or entire towns kept free of enemy drones by flooding them with your own technologically superior drones, which can then be occupied by your human troops.
Please disagree with me on this. The topic is fascinating, IMO. I've been waiting for decades to see this stuff happen and it seems to finally be just around the corner.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
23hr ago
Neither do it, at face value, but you and I are a vanishingly small minority.
And OTOH, let's dig deeper: I don't want there to be gibs, but since the gibs are already out of the box, why shouldn't they go to myself as well as to the less deserving? With that framing in mind, I too want gibs.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
23hr ago
Not sure. This seems like a fairly evident instance of moderating the post and not the poster. Hadad's was rule-compliant even if it was bad, whereas Chris' contained a personal attack and thus broke a rule even if it correctly identified Hadad's post as bad. Pretty much just like Amadan's modpost said. If this actually encourages Hadad (and/or others) to post more screeds and discourages Chris (and/or others) from arguing against them, then...well, that's not good either, of course, but it's by no means certain that that will even be the effect. Whereas ignoring the rules to play favorites with this or that poster just throws the foundations of the motte out of the window, which is certain to have negative consequences for everyone.
Because that's ridiculous if not disconcerting.
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