Rather like the Ukranian civil war, the world seems content to ignore the civil war in Pakistan and the fact that a global power is intervening on one side.
Just a reminder that a missile fired by a drone is no different than a missile fired by a manned jet or any other vehicle. Drones are simply a technology tool to help protect the lives of our own military. Drones are no different than something like stealth technology in that regard. I can't imagine that anyone would create an art project criticizing the US because the radar signature of our aircraft are too small. You shouldn't have a problem with how many people we kill with drones, you should have a problem with how many people we kill.
This is an easy mistake to make, when you can start automating stuff like this its a MASSIVE increase in scale that enables things that would have been nie impossible before, this qualitatively changes things.
Its like the argument about police drones, there is a fundamental qualitative difference between some cops driving/walking the beat, and every inch of a city under 100% constant surveillance and automatic cataloging of all activity.
They are no different functionally and perhaps morally (though on could argue that killing people remotely from your desk in Missouri is troubling).
They are VERY VERY different politically and therefore in reality, however. It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones. Maybe it's the low cost, or the fact that we don't risk American lives doing it, I'm not sure. If you looked at all the drone strikes over the last 10 years and replaced them with operations that involved american boots on the ground/f-16s/CIA wetwork etc it's very hard to imagine a scenario where that would have been acceptable to the American public.
Drones also have loitering capabilities that would be much more expensive to maintain with jets. Basically, I'm of the mind that drone strikes are seen as 'easy' and low risk politically so we end up killing more people than we would if we had to weigh the risks of more traditional means before we carried out the operation.
> You shouldn't have a problem with how many people we kill with drones, you should have a problem with how many people we kill.
I agree whole heartedly. The problem is, before, you had to convince and train enough people to fly jets and kill. It was "one person for one jet". In theory, in about 3-5 years (if not now) we could have one pilot in a room flying over 3 different regions of the world, only taking over control to "go in for the kill". I'm confident as a hobbyist I could build a system that would let me fly 3 small quadcopters (drones) in my back yard with autonomous mode & then switching each to manual control 1 by one. The technology has outpaced our policy around peace. Drones represent the potential for a disproportionate amount of people to be put in harms way vs the old way.
I still see it as a statement of just how many people we kill. Even if the problem with it is drone's, I still think the piece has merit. And beyond it's message, its construction and aesthetic is eerie and disturbing. It's built incredibly well.
Just a reminder than a nuclear bomb is no different than an army killing 6 million people like the holocaust did.
Sarcasm aside, you are talking nonsense, when you can write 'kill.everyoneWhoLooksLike("armed muslin")' without having to actually pull the trigger from your jet aiming at each group of guys that just seem to talk and passing time everything changes drastically, specially when you can show the former is a lot cheaper (in lives AND money)
There is a human pulling the trigger in New Mexico and an anonymous on-screen chat message from Washington informing the operator that, no that little figure they just accidentally blasted halfway across the world was most definitely a "dog".
>> For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.
THAT is the difference between a missile fired by a manned jet or other vehicle. Complete detachment from the people they're killing.
"When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world."
See how that goes? They didn't "really" murder someone, they push a button and someone died on the other side of the world. And I think that's not an incorrect view of what it is. There's various degrees of personal up-closeness when you actually kill another human, with bare hands, a knife, a gun, grenades/explosives, that bring with them gruweling psychological effects because for most people it is so deeply wrong ... and on the very other end of the spectrum there is "press a button and someone dies on the other side of the world", just a few steps removed from "buying a hot dog makes you somewhat responsible for a number of animal's deaths".
If that doesn't disgust you to the core of your being, then I don't quite know how I could explain it more clearly.
>> Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
>> "Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
>> "Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
>> "Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
>> Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
(BTW, this is not the same article I read a few years ago, it seems to fail to mention that Bryant was fired over this incident a few days after)
Reminds me of a short story written in 1914 by Franz Kafka called "In the Penal Colony"[1]. It's very much worth a read,
an English translation is available at [2].
In the story the condemned prisoners aren't told their sentence. There is a elaborate machine - described in much detail - that carves the sentence into the skin of the convict. The machine works (or used to work) in such precision, that after exactly 24 hours an epiphany about the misdeed and death occur simultaneously.
The current nearly worldwide drone campaign that the US is engaged in is one of the least ethical things this country has ever done. It has proven to be a mostly indiscriminate weapon, little better than using car bombs, and it has not only eroded America's moral high-ground on the international stage, it has in many cases destroyed a favorable image of the US and turned entire populations against us, for very little tangible benefit.
If you consider drone strikes to be indiscriminate, compare the upper bound of about 6,000[1] or so drone strike casualties over more than a decade to the 90,000[2] or so Vietnam bombing casualties, which in turn is dwarfed by the World War 2 bombing casualties[3]. Compared to the alternative of using traditional bombers or using ground forces, drone strikes represent a huge reduction in civilian casualties.
I don't understand the people who protest drone strikes. War is hell - if your country engages in any sort of violent military intervention, there will be civilian casualties. I can get behind opposing unnecessary usage of military force; I can get behind opposing attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation that we aren't at war with. Protesting the tools used to conduct war instead of the war itself makes little sense to me, particularly when that tool marks a dramatic improvement in reducing civilian casualties.
It's all relative. Compared to Dresden, small guided missiles are positively humane. Heck, the hammer that was dropped on Fallujah makes a drone look meek. War is by design very ugly.
Visualizations like these are incredible and I want to see more like them. We're at a time where data wealth and transparency is becoming more and more sought out and computers/microcontrollers are incredibly cheap.
An installation like this one would be thought provoking in an art gallery or event space, especially if it's pulling raw data. The silence, or even onslaught of noise, would be deafening. Presentations like these give a much more tangible understanding than points on a graph.
If art installations of this type became more commonplace we could begin to see dissenters manipulating them to make counterpoints. I'm sure someone with a favorable opinion of the drone program is already working towards a method to exploit this piece.
Worth mentioning the Red Alert : Israel iOS app. Informs you every time a missile is launched against Israel, rather distressing considering every notification means someone could/did die - and how often those notifications occur.
[+] [-] guiomie|10 years ago|reply
I never thought the US conducted so many strikes, especially in Pakistan ...
[+] [-] jbegley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanCal|10 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/K4NRJoCNHIs?t=672
Only a short quote, but quite powerful. The whole episode I think is worth it, but this always stuck with me.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|10 years ago|reply
Its like the argument about police drones, there is a fundamental qualitative difference between some cops driving/walking the beat, and every inch of a city under 100% constant surveillance and automatic cataloging of all activity.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
[+] [-] TrevorJ|10 years ago|reply
They are VERY VERY different politically and therefore in reality, however. It's been demonstrated that for whatever reason the public at large isn't nearly so concerned about military actions carried out by drones. Maybe it's the low cost, or the fact that we don't risk American lives doing it, I'm not sure. If you looked at all the drone strikes over the last 10 years and replaced them with operations that involved american boots on the ground/f-16s/CIA wetwork etc it's very hard to imagine a scenario where that would have been acceptable to the American public.
Drones also have loitering capabilities that would be much more expensive to maintain with jets. Basically, I'm of the mind that drone strikes are seen as 'easy' and low risk politically so we end up killing more people than we would if we had to weigh the risks of more traditional means before we carried out the operation.
[+] [-] lbotos|10 years ago|reply
I agree whole heartedly. The problem is, before, you had to convince and train enough people to fly jets and kill. It was "one person for one jet". In theory, in about 3-5 years (if not now) we could have one pilot in a room flying over 3 different regions of the world, only taking over control to "go in for the kill". I'm confident as a hobbyist I could build a system that would let me fly 3 small quadcopters (drones) in my back yard with autonomous mode & then switching each to manual control 1 by one. The technology has outpaced our policy around peace. Drones represent the potential for a disproportionate amount of people to be put in harms way vs the old way.
[+] [-] opnitro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|10 years ago|reply
A drone allows killing with zero risk of US life. That dramatically changes the likelihood that it will be used, for better or worse....
[+] [-] readme|10 years ago|reply
If a target isn't important enough to risk the lives of our own military, is it really just to target it?
[+] [-] ivanca|10 years ago|reply
Sarcasm aside, you are talking nonsense, when you can write 'kill.everyoneWhoLooksLike("armed muslin")' without having to actually pull the trigger from your jet aiming at each group of guys that just seem to talk and passing time everything changes drastically, specially when you can show the former is a lot cheaper (in lives AND money)
[+] [-] tripzilch|10 years ago|reply
There is a human pulling the trigger in New Mexico and an anonymous on-screen chat message from Washington informing the operator that, no that little figure they just accidentally blasted halfway across the world was most definitely a "dog".
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-aft...
>> For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.
THAT is the difference between a missile fired by a manned jet or other vehicle. Complete detachment from the people they're killing.
"When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world."
See how that goes? They didn't "really" murder someone, they push a button and someone died on the other side of the world. And I think that's not an incorrect view of what it is. There's various degrees of personal up-closeness when you actually kill another human, with bare hands, a knife, a gun, grenades/explosives, that bring with them gruweling psychological effects because for most people it is so deeply wrong ... and on the very other end of the spectrum there is "press a button and someone dies on the other side of the world", just a few steps removed from "buying a hot dog makes you somewhat responsible for a number of animal's deaths".
If that doesn't disgust you to the core of your being, then I don't quite know how I could explain it more clearly.
>> Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
>> "Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
>> "Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
>> "Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
>> Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
(BTW, this is not the same article I read a few years ago, it seems to fail to mention that Bryant was fired over this incident a few days after)
[+] [-] weinzierl|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony
[2] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/inthepenalcolony.htm
SPOILER:
In the story the condemned prisoners aren't told their sentence. There is a elaborate machine - described in much detail - that carves the sentence into the skin of the convict. The machine works (or used to work) in such precision, that after exactly 24 hours an epiphany about the misdeed and death occur simultaneously.
[+] [-] gweinberg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csandreasen|10 years ago|reply
I don't understand the people who protest drone strikes. War is hell - if your country engages in any sort of violent military intervention, there will be civilian casualties. I can get behind opposing unnecessary usage of military force; I can get behind opposing attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation that we aren't at war with. Protesting the tools used to conduct war instead of the war itself makes little sense to me, particularly when that tool marks a dramatic improvement in reducing civilian casualties.
[1] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...
[2] http://thevietnamwar.info/operation-rolling-thunder/
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_strat...
[+] [-] kleer001|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damoncali|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rel|10 years ago|reply
An installation like this one would be thought provoking in an art gallery or event space, especially if it's pulling raw data. The silence, or even onslaught of noise, would be deafening. Presentations like these give a much more tangible understanding than points on a graph.
[+] [-] thekeg1108|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ommunist|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] volaski|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply