tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29873405.post115160232451629547..comments2023-08-27T01:42:24.076-07:00Comments on The Technoprogressive: The Hellish Reality of WarDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29873405.post-1151685303293530982006-06-30T09:35:00.000-07:002006-06-30T09:35:00.000-07:00The folks over at Meme Therapy did one of their Br...The folks over at Meme Therapy did one of their Brain Parade columns today -- in which they ask a handful of people for their responses on some topic or other. Today's question: <A HREF="http://memetherapy.blogspot.com/2006/06/brain-parade-when-robots-kill.html" REL="nofollow">"The military is increasingly using robotic technology. What kinds of ethical considerations should we be making before we automate killing?"</A> My response to their question was very much in line with your thinking in today's post:<BR/><BR/>"Well, I think ethical considerations should compel us to reject the automation of killing altogether. Ethics also has something to say about the social costs of the war addiction of our bomb-building elites, and about the long-term personal and social costs imposed by the brutal roboticizing process that transforms citizens into soldiers in the first place. You know, killing a human being should simply never seem easy. It’s so obvious it sounds sanctimonious to point it out, but there it is. And since we’re having this exchange in a time of war it should be said often and loudly as well that definitely we know we’re in trouble when so many of our elected representatives sound glib at best when they say war is a last resort. Every war is a disaster, every war is a defeat -- even when we “win” one. Wars of choice like the current catastrophic Iraq adventure especially bespeak an almost unfathomably profound breakdown of the ethical imaginary.<BR/><BR/>"The automation of mass violence -- via mass media distraction, via the video-gamization of weaponry, via the neuroceutical modification of soldiery -- is an extraordinary intensification of the techniques of training and drill that have long functioned as a ritual instrumentalization of the individual soldier. This instrumentalization has everything to do with the obliteration of ethics in the encounter of subjects in a war-zone and its replacement with an encounter between objectified no-longer-quite subjects. The outright roboticization of militarism is a step along a tragic trajectory rather than the appearance of something altogether new."<BR/><BR/>The great John Shirley had fairly sensible things to say as well, I noticed.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.com