Singer concludes that 'costless war' will remain a mirage:
Whether it’s watching wars from afar or sending robots instead of fellow citizens into harm’s way, robotics offers the public and its leaders the lure of riskless warfare. All the potential gains of war would come without the costs, and even be mildly entertaining.
It’s a heady enticement, and not just for evil warmongers. The world watched the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Congo but did little, chiefly because the public didn’t know or care enough and the perceived costs of doing something truly effective seemed too high. Substitute unmanned systems for troops, and the calculus might be changed. Indeed, imagine all the genocides and crimes against humanity that could be ended if only the human barriers to war were lowered. Getting tired of some dictator massacring his people? Send in your superior technology and watch on YouTube as his troops are taken down.
Yet wars never turn out to be that simple. They are complex, messy, and unpredictable. And this will remain the case even as unmanned systems increasingly substitute for humans.
But let’s imagine that such fantasies of cheap and costless unmanned wars were to come true, that we could use robots to stop bad things being done by bad people, with no blowback, no muss, and no fuss. Even that prospect should give us pause. By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart.
Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.
Even if the nation sending in its robots acts in a just cause, such as stopping a genocide, war without risk or sacrifice becomes merely an act of somewhat selfish charity. One side has the wealth to afford high technologies, and the other does not. The only message of “moral character” a nation transmits is that it alone gets the right to stop bad things, but only at the time and place of its choosing, and most important, only if the costs are low enough. With robots, the human costs weighed against those lives that might be saved become zero. It doesn’t mean the nation shouldn’t act. But when it does, it must realize that even the just wars become exercises in playing God from afar, with unmanned weapons substituting for thunderbolts.
Read the whole (very long) thing.
Mr. Singer's alarm over the prospect of increased eagerness for war is misplaced, I think: Democracies' discomfort with the projection of their power has only increased with time and technology, after all. But we'd be silly to think technology will give us an unproblematic and comfortable future. There will always be a strong need for personal courage and morality to make hard decisions well, regardless of how numerous or capable our weapon systems may be.
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