Ask A Genius 926: Machines Fighting Machines?
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/21
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk very briefly about reductio ad absurdum of the concept of war, technically in the state of modern warfare because we’re moving into a world more and more where drones are becoming part of things and I don’t mean just drones that fly around and suicide themselves into a tank or a few personnel in an armed vehicle or something. When these things are in a semi-autonomous state, machines will fight a lot. So, at what point does this make the concept of war just robots fighting robots? Isn’t that a comical reductio ad absurdum of the idea of war in modern times?
Rick Rosner: I don’t know because we have two modern wars going, at least two. We have Ukraine, and we have Israel-Gaza and drones are used in each, but the human death tolls are still considerable, and the savagery is still significant. Russia’s at least official number of dead in Ukraine has just passed 50,000, and I’ve seen reports, though I don’t know if they’re substantiated, of half a million casualties dead and wounded on both sides combined. In Gaza, the death toll just surpassed 34,000, which is roughly 1.7% of the population of Gaza. So yeah, these aren’t clean wars. I think that drones may be helpful and certainly help each side wage war, but the human carnage has yet to be reduced, I think.
Jacobsen: So, what you’re saying is still considerable.
Rosner: Yeah, I mean the initial attack on October 7th of Hamas on Israel; I forget if there were drones involved, but that was like straight-up terrorism and guerrilla warfare where they killed 1,200 Israelis.
Jacobsen: Did you know any family that lost people?
Rosner: Do I? No.
Jacobsen: Do you have any Israeli family?
Rosner: No, we don’t have that many. We don’t have strong ties to Israel. We have a nephew who married an Israeli, and I’m sure they know a ton of people because Israel is just a teeny country. Carol’s cousin’s ex-wife is there, and I’m sure she knows a ton of people, but again, they’ve been divorced for 15 or 20 years, so we don’t talk to her.
Anyway, the state of modern war is not bloodless, and there are plenty of mistakes with drones. Obama used drones a lot against ISIS, and there were plenty of wrong targeting and civilian deaths and blowing up a wedding when he thought it was some other kind of gathering. So, we have a way to go. Trump was no better; Trump loosened up the rules of engagement. Obama killed a ton of ISIS, and Trump killed ISIS even faster by loosening the rules of engagement. So, he had a higher ratio of civilian deaths, and then Trump announced that he’d wiped out ISIS, but as we’ve seen, ISIS is still around.
Twenty years from now, will war be more bloodless? I don’t know. The US finally, after months of arguing and political paralysis, passed an aid packet for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. So, Taiwan is another place that could be the site of a hostile invasion because China still considers Taiwan to be part of China. Taiwan makes the world’s best chips; a third of the world’s chips are sold in Taiwan, and China wants that business. So, if China attacked Taiwan, nobody wants that, but given that you’ve got two high-tech countries, that might give you a better idea of what future warfare looks like. Would it be less bloody? I don’t know, and I hope we don’t find out.
[Recording End]
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