Fwd: The Future of Warfare

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: av
Date: Jan 29, 2012 1:36 AM
Subject: The Future of Warfare
To: "john sokol" <john.sokol@gmail.com>
AUTOMATION OF VIOLENCE....
its our fault - guys like you and me - the techies.
hoisted by our own inventions....


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The Future of Warfare
via Global Guerrillas by John Robb on 1/27/12
Up Front:
I'm currently proof reading, and enjoying immensely, the new book "Kill Decision" by my good friend Dan Suarez.  It's about autonomous drones.  That's legendary timing for a new book (on top of that, his approach to the genre blows away Clancy at his best).  So, as you can see, I'm particularly jazzed about this topic right now.
I've done some consulting with Northrop Grumman on the future of drones.
Finally, if you want to get ahead of the curve on this, read some of my older posts on drones and supermpowerment over the last four years.
Onto the post:::
Here's the future.  Courtesy of Northrop Grumman.
It's an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs).   Say that word again:  autonomous.   That's the breakthrough feature.  This also means:
It can make its own "kill decision."  Again and again and again.  That decision is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper (Moore's law has made insect level intelligence available for pennies, rat intelligence is next).
It isn't vulnerabe to a pilot in Nevada directing it to land in Iran. Oops.
It will eventually (sooner than you think) be the "Queen," making decisions for thousands of smaller swarmed (semi-autonomous) drones it lays on a battle zone (aka "city").  
In sum:  It allows an unprecedented automation of conventional violence.  
Granted, it will be possible for small groups to put together systems like this on the cheap.  For offensive or defense reasons.
However, I'm much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).