I think it would just make wars more likely because the perceived cost in friendly human lives will be close to zero.

I believe you're right. The thing that probably stops most modern democratic nations from going to war, if we're being pragmatic, is the political backlash to its leaders stemming from the loss of citizen lives. If you remove this from the equation, nations will likely be more predisposed to engage in conflict; its leaders will be shielded from the most immediate downsides of war, and the population more predisposed to ignore it.

Or, since he is not there he could be even more trigger happy.

Or, N robots could integrate and act upon commands from M operators, where M >> N. Decoupling the control logic from the pointy end could allow you to use the (fast, automatic, and expensive) pointy end at a proper speed without a reduction in control accuracy.

The idea of one robot having one (potentially flawed) operator seems exceedingly dated to me. In conjunction with AI and dynamically created battlefield models, we could relegate the human brain into making those decisions that human brain is good at ("that's a terrorist, and that guy is a civilian") and let machines do their job at what they excel at ("let's use drone 17, it has its barrel only 7 degrees away from the target, already moving in the right direction, and can hit it within the next 700 milliseconds").

Hopefully, we can use gamification to provide incentives not to kill civilians.

But, since it's very likely to record the events on video, there's substantial motivation to do things By The Book.

Hasn't this already been explored with the current generation drone pilots, and previous generation aerial bomber crews.

Psychological removal is a serious concern. It could be a lot easier to kill someone when you're removed by a few layers of abstraction.

I think it might be other way around. It's harder to kill if you or your friends are not in danger. And if you can see in all gory details and contemplate what effect your weapon has on the body of an enemy.

On the plus side, doesn't it also lower the psychological harm that happens to many a soldier in sustained war?

Actually the experience so far with drone pilots shows that they get PTSD at the same rate as combat pilots who were physically there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-g...

We're still in the beginning. Removing the "witnessing the carnage" part could still be accomplished one day. As I mentioned, using our brains just to simulate humans on-site controlling stuff at the battlefield may not be the best use we could come up with. Compared to what I had in mind, current drones are just glorified RC models. Thanks for the interesting link, though. This risk is always there, I guess.

When your personal risk is reduced, you do not need to make the split second identification that leeds to a civilian death.

This article came out last month: http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/09/17/emotional-attachme...

I wonder how this will affect robot operators when their "avatar" comes under threat..?

Not really true. Believing you develop an affective relationship with a machine in nuts. With animals is different.

I know those guys in Spain: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEDAX

They mainly deactivate bombs from the Spanish Civil war and from terrorist organizations like ETA.

Of course you are seriously affected when your robot is destroyed. Those things are really expensive. You will have to spend a significant effort replacing it, and it takes some work to make a machine operative so of course you are pissed off like anybody will be is their car paint is scratched by a key.

PS: Your job is also threaten if you are so incompetent to destroy too much public property.

I think where this can work is in peacekeeping missions/New World Order kinds of missions. Going into Somalia, Syria, etc. to stop internal bloodshed without multinational armies having to go in and losing soldiers.

It hasn't really worked out that way with drones so far. Aerial combat drones are supposed to be precision strike platforms capable of minimizing civilian deaths. In practice they've been little better than using car bombs as assassination weapons, with about the same level of collateral damage.

Drones and ground robots are very different scenarios. Soldiers on the ground have to make split second decisions. Our pilots tend to have a bit longer and are much better protected.

[edit] Also, the current tactics with the drones seem to be set to kill more civilians than needed (bombing again an hour later when rescue personnel are at the scene). Ariel drones and soldiers on the ground are totally different scenarios.

Car bombing terrorists in the middle east is a huge step up from what we used to do: lob cruise missiles randomly into conflict zones.

The problem isn't civilian casualties, it's our propensity for war.