The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone
We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing that reflects the radar waves, whatever that is. There are artillery shells which home in on vehicles and so on). The launch decision by the human means "I'm responsible for this thing hitting and the thing that it finds". The kill/no-kill decision is made at launch time. An AA missile might hit a civilan jet, but there is no way the operator will make a new kill/no-kill decision once it reaches the jet. You made the decision at launch.
That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.
If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.
I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.
Don't forget there's a war on right now in which precision munitions are being used to specifically target hospitals full of civilians on the pretext that the enemy is allegedly underneath.
Human soldiers kill civilians pretty much all the time. Then they brag to their friends how cool they are. Drones do not rape, soldiers rape (and yes they rape men too in case someone wants to make it about gender).
All the bombs Russia thrown onto Ukrainian civilians were thrown by human soldiers.
I didn't know that I was on Reddit, I thought I was with a more educated crowd than that.
Your name calling - 'Petrov', 'tovarisch' - demonstrates that you are not making your case with logic and reason. You have a made up mind, driven by emotion, so there is no room for intellectual discussion here.
From the Russian perspective the SMO is the SMO. War has not been declared, it is an SMO. If my dog attacks my neighbour's dog then you could call it war, equally, tariffs on imports could be called war. However, in 'war', it has to be declared as such. Since it has not been declared, the option of calling the SMO the SMO is appropriate.
There is no 'whataboutism' in my comment, I am not denying any historical war crimes, just stating that a defending army is not going to be killing those they are defending, and this also applies with military adventures outside national boundaries, citing the Falklands example.
Whether or not you are Russophobic, you must acknowledge that Russians identify with the Russian speaking, Russian Orthodox Church going people in the east of the former Ukraine. Whether you like it or not, Russians see these people as their own and are therefore not there to kill the men, rape the women and sell their children into slavery.
As for the Bandera supporting, blue and yellow fanatical nationalists of Galicia in the West of what remains of the Ukraine, it is no secret that Russians don't imagine having any fraternal ties with them.
My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix.
A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” because it looks much more like a videogame.
