We are SO over due for revolution.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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You don’t often get a military holding a press conference to announce it has committed a war crime.
Butlerian Jihad when?
Ah, splendid. We are barreling towards the Forever Winter nicely.
2 years ago 🙄
dontthinkaboutit.dontthinkaboutit.dontthinkaboutit.dontthinkaboutit.dontthinkaboutit.
you roll your eyes while most others are sweating profusely
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The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war.
Eh. I see this as an "flying landmine," not an existential Terminator kind of thing.
A computer is not making a "decision" to kill. Its a machine. It's bomb exploding when triggered, just with extra steps of flying to a specific spot.
It's morally problematic. Like landmines.
But I think people are falsly attributing anything resembling sentience to this system, like they do with conversation-trained LLMs. Humans made the “decision” way ahead of time, just like when they set up land mines or perform a bombing run.
You can, to some extent, avoid an undiscriminating minefield. You can, to some extent, plead for mercy from the jack boot kicking in your door. You cannot avoid or plead with a mine flying through your bedroom window.
You can’t plead with a missile either. Nor a camouflaged IED.
I’m not saying it’s morale. It’s not.
I’m just saying this isn’t a case of “an artificial intelligence pulling the trigger.” It is not “fully autonomous” kill in the way the headline insinuates. This is a toaster preprogrammed to explode, autonomously.
In fact, I’d argue it’s a dangerous characterization, as it removes some culpability from whoever setup the kill drone, like the equipment made a decision. The equipment did not make the decision, its operator did.
I fail to see your point. Yes weapons kill people. But no weapon in history could
- be cheaply dispersed over populated areas
- linger for hours or potentially days
- patrol and chase targets into any kind of cover
- instantly and autonomously take offensive action outside of any chain of command
Did you read the article? The equipment does make the decision. That's the whole point. One remote operator vibe-killing scores of people extremely efficiently. Yes there's a human deciding to put the drones in flight but why would that remove culpability any more than collateral damage from a traditional explosive?
By your logic, nukes exist so there's no reason to worry about any other types of war crime.
That’s what I’m trying to reiterate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t worry about it. This is horrific.
But it’s not Terminator. It’s further extended drone warfare.
There’s a very important distinction between this, and some kind of cognizant machine that starts in a relatively neutral state and decides to kill certain targets, like (say) the corpo robots one often sees in cyberpunk fiction. One that has agency to set that up in the first place.
I see a lot of correlation between fictional war bots, tech bro “AI,” and this kind of drone warfare, and they are all completely unrelated. The most sophisticated thing going on here is a CV guidance system dumber than many missiles, and I just don’t want to muddy the waters with any kind of assertion that these weapons have any sapience, that we’ve “offloaded” the decision to kill. It’s just a very immoral weapon, indeed very detached from deployment.
Military training exists to brainwash decent human beings with a sense of morality and critical thinking abilities, who know they mustn't kill and would refuse requests to kill, into killing machines who are proud to follow orders (and then experience PTSD when they're returned to civilian life and realize what they've done).
Therefore, I contend that fully autonomous drones have killed human beings since wars have been a thing, and those drones are called "soldiers".
Fun and interesting take, as far as commentary on soldiers.
These new fully autonomous drones though, are able to be mass produced by Capital. That's the important difference. It means that there is a nascent way, to bypass the need to have a country with high births to fuel a war machine, and you can just more easily Capital your way to domination.
And that's kinda scary.
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I can barely see you up there on that high horse.
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Yeah, let's hope we don't make a habit out of this. Landmines are already bad enough.
Instead of stepping in the wrong place, someone runs an antivirus on an old system in eleven years and accidentally triggers a murder bot to fly out and pop some music teacher walking their dog
The only thing that could have stopped this would have been the lower classes, worldwide, becoming a unified front for the last century or more. These killbots are not only here, already and being used, they will become the default within 5 years. Watch.
None of the world's governments have lifted a finger in the last year of continuous, televised genocides of civilians, women, the elderly, and children. They certainly aren't going to draw a line in the sand for unseen killbots that nebulously might be responsible for some civilian deaths at some point in the future.
Not only will these be used in war, these will be used in civilian life too. How do you think the world's wealthy plan to stay that way?
They know very well that in the past when inequality has risen to these levels, they fall. They know it's because no guards will chose them over the mass of, now angry, people that the guards were birthed from and spent their lives with.
The killbots are for you and me baby. It is already written.
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Thing is that both are currently being used it droves in Ukraine. About anything bar chemical or nuclear has.
Even setting aside any apocalyptic scenarios, this is bad. You used to have to look your enemy in the eyes and stab them. Then you just had to see them from afar and shoot them. Now you don't have to acknowledge them at all.
Most of the casualties were from bombers for a long time already, this is that but one step removed.
It's bad for a different reason, you in this case don't exist anymore. We used to have people killing people, now there are autonomous robots doing this, and that's a new, completely different class of warfare.
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I'm glad they, allegedly, stopped after the one test. This sounds an awful lot like a war crime on Ukraine's part. Enemy combatants (especially since we know most of Russia's army are being trafficked) need the opportunity to surrender peacefully.
Pretty sure it's not a war crime yet. Damn sure it should be. Human in the loop. Update Geneva conventions.
As if having a human in the loop would make slaughtering people more humanitarian. How many reports have we read of soldiers from any power perpetrating horrendous acts on enemy combatants, or worse, civilians?
I agree that murder without prejudice should be curtailed if at all possible and that autonomous robots are not likely to accept surrender, but it's not like human agressors are always open to it either.
Not saying it's good, or humanitarian. War crimes don't stop war (much as I would prefer it all to be called murder rather than state sanctioned violence). The Geneva accords create a bottom level of godawful that is unacceptable that the various militaries agree on. Hopefully it helps protects civilians and soldiers both. AI weapons are a plausible existential threat, they should be treated as such, also, importantly, they are also a vector for plausible deniability.
'Humans in the loop' could also provide a level of friction that might make atrocities less common as the commanders cover their asses by putting responsibility on those lower down in the hierarchy, who might choose not to. The only reason nuclear war didn't happen in the 60s was one person saying NO
Of course, the US is (likely) currently bombing civilian water supplies, so we need to drag ourselves back up to basic humanity (and yes, humanity is anything but basic as history attends).
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Headline is somewhat misleading, article is based off an admission from a Ukrainian military officer about a test that happened two years ago.
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