MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘human life’

How Will Human Life on Earth End, And What to Do About This?

Posted by M. C. on May 21, 2022

The point I am trying to make is that we human beings face problems, serious ones. Several can mean the end of life as we know it. The more serious ones can eventuate in the death of all of us, children and grandchildren included. Do we really want to risk this? Are we really going to fritter our way out of saving ourselves by fighting each other?

By Walter E. Block

Ron Paul Institute

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/may/19/how-will-human-life-on-earth-end-and-what-to-do-about-this/

How will human life on the third rock from the sun end? A comet, or a bug, or nuclear war, or alien creatures might come and kick us all in the posterior.

Actually, probably, well, possibly, one of these millions of years, all life will cease on our planet, except for very hardy micro-organisms. What are the candidates to do the evil deed?

First up in the batter’s box is some sort of super-duper bug that will make Covid look like a walk in the park. Second in the batting order will be a nuclear war between human beings. In third place? A gigantic comet will come crashing down upon us, obliterating the entire planet. That one will challenge even our fellow micro-organism creatures. In the clean-up position? Who knows. Maybe advanced powerful alien creatures from the planet Zorgon who want to eat us all.

But whatever is this threat, the danger will be enhanced by human error. What kind of mistake are we making? We are fighting each other. Mary Tyler Moore used to say that “love is all around us.” We can now opine, more accurately, unfortunately, that “hostility is all around us.” Wars abound; there are more of them than you can shake a stick at. Violent crime is seemingly ever erupting.

What is the source of all of this? The sociobiological explanation might well be the most accurate: we humans needed a nasty streak in order to fight off the saber tooth lions and their brethren of field and stream when all we had was sticks and rocks at our disposal. But the residue of such behavior is still with us, when it is no longer needed; when it is positively harmful to our well-being. Any 90-pound weakling of our species with the proper equipment can nowadays make minced meat of the most ferocious mega fauna now bestriding the earth or swimming around in its waters. And this goes as well for dinosaurs should they ever pop up again, several movies to the contrary notwithstanding.

The point I am trying to make is that we human beings face problems, serious ones. Several can mean the end of life as we know it. The more serious ones can eventuate in the death of all of us, children and grandchildren included. Do we really want to risk this? Are we really going to fritter our way out of saving ourselves by fighting each other? Can we not resolve to cease and desist from what in effect might possibly become species annihilation? If not, we will be committing mass suicide.

The first step, it seems to me, is to somehow orchestrate a cease fire and then a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine. Part and parcel of this would be that the former should obligate itself not to topple the government of the latter, nor criminalize any of its leaders; in response, the latter should give up all efforts to join NATO. That organization should be disbanded in any peace treaty, not further expanded in an eastward direction. Let’s say no to the entrance of Finland and Sweden.

There are equally serious conflagrations continually occurring in Africa. A large part of this emanates from the fact that Europeans all too often set up national boundaries that totally ignored ethnicity. This is a recipe for disaster. Secession might well be the best way out of this morass. But that will take understanding and willingness to see the other side’s view that unhappily is in all too short supply. Why should it be alright for the thirteen colonies to secede from England, but not, say, for California or Texas, to depart from the United States? A peaceful secession would also dampen down the threat of war in Spain.

Is this too much to ask from our fellow humans? Probably it is, given our history of murdering each other. But, happily, we can now at least ask. Maybe, pray for peace and good will toward each other. As for those aliens, why not reserve our nastiness for them?


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Make no mistake: Military robots are not there to preserve human life, they are there to allow even more endless wars — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on January 7, 2020

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/476705-killer-robots-save-lives-war/

Helen Buyniski
Helen Buyniski
When human troops are replaced by robots on the battlefield, it won’t be because the Pentagon’s had some revelation about the value of human life – it’ll be an effort to defuse anti-war protests by minimizing visible casualties.

US military commanders are itching to get their hands on some killer robots after an Army war game saw a human-robot coalition repeatedly rout an all-human company three times its size. The technology used in the computer-simulated clashes doesn’t exist quite yet – the concept was only devised a few months ago – but it’s in the pipeline, and that should concern anyone who prefers peace to war.

 

Captain Philip Belanger gushed to Breaking Defense last week, after commanding the silicon soldiers through close to a dozen battles at Fort Benning Maneuver Battle Lab.  When they tried to fight an army three times their size again without the robotic reinforcements? “Things did not go well for us,” Belanger admitted.

What could go wrong?

So why shouldn’t the US military save its troops by sending in specially-designed robots to do their killing? While protecting American lives is one reason to oppose the US’ ever-metastasizing endless wars, it’s far from the only reason. Civilian casualties are already a huge problem with drone strikes, which by some estimates kill their intended target only 10 percent of the time.  Drones, an early form of killer robot, offer minimal sensory input for the operator, making it difficult to distinguish combatants from non. Soldiers controlling infantry-bots from afar will have even less visibility, being stuck to the ground, and their physical distance from the action means shooting first and asking questions later becomes an act no more significant than pulling the trigger in a first-person-shooter video game.

Any US military lives saved by using robot troops will thus be more than compensated for by a spike in civilian casualties on the other side. This will be ignored by the media, as “collateral damage” often is, but the UN and other international bodies might locate their long-lost spines and call out the wholesale slaughter of innocents by the Pentagon’s death machines…

Meanwhile, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of anti-war groups, scientists, academics, and politicians who’d rather not take a ‘wait and see’ approach to a technology that could destroy the human race, are calling on the United Nations to adopt an international ban on autonomous killing machines. Whose future would you prefer?

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Killer robots and cunning plans

 

 

 

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