New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable? (SkyNet?)

LA Times ^ | January 26, 2012 | W.J. Hennigan

[Carry_Okie]

Now if your computer says THAT to you, it’s time to head for the hills.

Uh, no. You cut the power.

[gura]

I hope we build thousands of these so that in a future potential conflict we can throw dozens into every “blue” kill box available. “Purple” kill boxes we save for manned planes because of potential fratricide issues.

Look how small it is. How many can a big CVN carry? 50? 60?

At sea 40 of these tossing 8 SDB’s a piece at you would mess up your fleet in a big way.

[Lazamataz]

[Ramius]

Exactly. Lotta heat here without much light. The drone isn’t making any decisions. The decisions about where and when to use any weapons are still made by human operators whether that decision is made at launch and programmed in, or made at a point later in the mission.

To say that it has no “pilot” just means that it doesn’t need a person on the stick to do any of the flying. That part can by handled just fine by the computers. But humans are still telling the computer where to fly, when, and what to do then it gets there. Whoever is doing that is really the “pilot”, but instead of a stick and throttle they use a map and a mouse.

It’s written like they’re letting the computer make decisions about who to kill, and that’s just not the case.

[Little Ray]

I don’t know if its X-47B, but isn’t there a UCAV that can respond to air defense and independently launch an attack against it?

[EEGator]

August 29, 1997

[TexasRepublic]

We could place bets how long it will be until the Iranians or Chinese get hold of one of these.

[Broker]

The Chinese are most likely selling us their out-of-date technology. The truth is always stranger than fiction.

[Rappini]

I just hope that the Iranians don’t get it. You would think we would have learned how to preclude an intercept.

[af_vet_rr]

"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."

The "dumb" bombs we dropped in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc. didn't "discriminate" so what's the issue? Sounds like a bunch of folks that just want to attack the military any way they can.