Will Your Protest Be Terminated By Killer Robots?

Paul Craig Roberts

Did you know that the latest big business is killer robots? Not only drones that can be insect size and lethal, but also Terminator-type machines that will have the power to decide who lives and dies. Of course, the way has been paved for killer robots and their inevitable mistakes, as the US military no longer differentiates between actual combatants and collateral damage.

The US government no longer pays any attention to the Geneva Conventions and the
international laws once supported by the United States until “the war on terror” took over the government. The Bush and Obama regimes have eliminated morality from the picture. Any combatant who surrenders or is captured is likely to be illegally tortured, as all available evidence shows. Once killer robots are unleashed, under the rights of surrender, how does one surrender to a killer robot? If a robot commits war crimes, how is the robot held accountable?

These are serious issues. Professor Noel Sharkey, a robotics and artificial intelligence expert at Sheffield University, says that “in America they are already training more drone pilots than real aircraft pilots.”

The majority of Americans have no idea either of the collapse of morality that the Bush and Obama regimes have achieved or of the dark abyss that awaits them. Most Americans–even unfortunately the ACLU–think that the moral issues deserving of political and legal attention are abortion rights and gay rights. While the country lines up on one side or the other of these two subsidiary issues, the Bill of Rights is struck down.

Most Americans are not even aware of the future that is being decided for them. They can’t see anything as more important than sports contests or NASCAR races, or how to arrange financing for the purchase of whatever it is that they regard as the need of the moment.

The vast bulk of the American population is completely capable of losing every civil right without ever knowing that they have lost the rights.

It is really extraordinary that it only took Bush and Obama ten years to destroy the US Constitution, the basis for our civil existence.

Will Congress give the next president the title of Augustus?

Read Tracy McVeigh’s account of killer robots and the effort to stop them in The Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/23/stop-killer-robots

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