In response to our post “U.S. Policy on Robots in Warfare,” Mark Gubrud has passed along to us a comment:
It was odd that on the Monday morning after the Friday afternoon when my Bulletin article appeared, John Markoff of the New York Times posted an article whose message many took as contradictory to mine. Where I had characterized U.S. policy as “full speed ahead,” Markoff reported that the military “lags” in development of unmanned ground vehicles, which, as you know, go by the great acronym of UGVs.
There isn’t really any contradiction between the facts as reported by Markoff and the history and analysis I gave, as I explained on my personal blog, but anybody who read the two casually, or only looked at the headlines, could be forgiven for thinking that Markoff had rebutted me, perhaps upholding the myth that there is some kind of a moratorium in effect.
In that blog post he mentions, Gubrud expands on the strangeness of the NYT article, or at least its headline. The headline in both the print and the online edition of Markoff’s article says that
the U.S. military “lags” in its pursuit of robotic ground vehicles. Lags… behind whom? China? North Korea? No, Markoff warns that the Pentagon is falling behind another aspiring superpower: Google.
Well worth reading the whole thing.
Strange how you always have enough taxdollars for murder tools, but always too few for first-world standard healthcare.
Mark Gubrud is not qualified to comment on issues of military and sefl-defense. Only those who accept the non-aggression principle are qualified to talk of these matters. Mark has made comments in the past with regards to personal and bodily autonomy that makes clear that he does not respect the non-aggression principle at all.