Hyperbole is a bipartisan indulgence.

Robots at War

John Carney thinks that the growing use of robots in armed conflict could cut down on war-marking. That doesn’t seem likely. Here’s why.

Consider:

But there’s another type of war demand that probably would be [diminished]. That’s the popular war demand, the “war fever” that has been witnessed countless times through the ages. A key factor of this demand is the manliness of fighting wars: bravery in the face of battle, iron in the blood forged in the furnace of fighting. Drone warfare simply won’t satisfy this demand, which would mean that as wars get cheaper to fight they also get less interesting to fight.

First, Let’s defer to Chris Bodener, who just this week provided some great insight on this point:

[W]ith our exponential reliance on technology for combat, physical prowess is becoming more and more obsolete. In fact, given the rapid dominance of women in higher education, the battlefields of the future - reliant on robots - could be dominated by women as well.

One more issue. It seems apparent that the nature of “manliness” as it relates to war changes dramatically from conflict to conflict (again, as technology advances, which Carney mentions below). Fighting with fixed bayonets was the norm during the American Civil War, not with full, bull-proof body armor as we have today. Surely such precautionary garb would be seen as less “manly” in the eyes of old war veterans? Or, even as the “manly” act of soldiering becomes safer and “less manly” compared to past conflicts, it could still be considered “manly” to the other groups of that generation. Either way, it’d be hard to prove that this cycle has prevented any serious conflict.

Continuing, Carney says:

Something along these lines seems to have happened with the last round of innovations in war fighting. Bombers and tanks made a lot of traditional warfare obsolete. Instead of coming home from the trenches of World War I with tales of derring-do that might inspire the next generation to seek their own war, WWI vets seemed to have taken a dim view of their war. And that worked: the Europeans only fought one more war against each other that century.

So his proof that truly great (in scale) wars disincentivize nations from starting wars in the future is that only one other big European war happened in that century. But the only problem with this is that his “one more war” was the greatest war the world had—and has—ever known. Between 40 and 72 million people died. Its overall cost is estimated at over $5 trillion ($288 million, adjusted to inflation). And it effectively ushered in bilateral domination of global politics for the half-century following. Even if the Europeans wanted to start another war, it’s not clear how they could have done it (unless they had some robots lying around?).

Regarding Carney’s theory that robots might “dampen the demand for war”, Kevin Drum, whom Carney mentions, asks “When we get to the point where one side is able to conduct war effectively with virtually no fear of loss of life, does that mean that public pressure against war will start to fade away?”

We presume yes, but for an altogether different reason: once robots have become full-service soldiers, we’ll push for them to fill our post-war roles as well. Effective nation-building, in many ways almost as risky as war, will become their added functionality. Failed and near-failed states may start playing hosts to armies of school-building, language-translating, and vote-counting robots. And there’s a lot of failed and near-failed states out there…so why not try and fix them up, as some might ask? Is there a race of automated colonizers waiting for us in the years ahead?

Suddenly, humanity has his hands full. As do its robots.

Photo Credit: Venca Robotics’ BEAR: Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot

There are good ships, and there are wood ships,
The ships that sail the sea.
But may the best ships are friendships,
And may they always be

Yale Fail?

Christopher Hitchens is furious at Yale University Press for what he’s referring to as possibly the “worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture”: specifically, its refusal to reprint the controversial Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons in an upcoming book, The Cartoons That Shook the World:

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility…What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

What’s interesting but unsaid on this issue is the silence of the author the book, Jytte Klausen. One would think that including the actual artwork which ignited the situation to which the entire volume is dedicated would be a no-brainer—and that if a potential publisher were to reject reprinting them, it would have behooved Ms. Klausen to pitch elsewhere.

Otherwise, while the bigger issue as Hitchens mentions is the false assumption of responsibility on behalf of the publisher for possible negative reactions, another important facet is where this self-censorship is coming from. It’s something when, say, a smallish Danish university would decide not to reprint these cartoons. But when it’s one of America’s largest and well-known research universities—with a network of resources that spans the entire world—well clearly that is something else.

Institutions such as these are arguably the last bastion of places where unpopular and controversial ideas, dissected for the sake of knowledge alone, are still allowed and supported. Bad ideas are the straw men of a society—they need to be set up for judgement by collective common sense. If locked away, they’ll simply fester. Maybe the next study will let them out.

Could New Urbanism Save the Midwest?

St. Louis, Missouri is the prototypical Midwestern city. It’s large in size, boasts a rich local history, and lays claim to a set of wildly popular major sports teams. It’s enviably affordable, and hosts several world-class medical and educational institutions. And its weather? Relatively pleasant (albeit sticky in summer).

But most importantly, it suffers from a staggering city-county disparity which has left its inner city devestated and outer suburbs thriving and highly livable.

The Lou is not an outlier. From Detroit to Ohio’s three C’s to as far west as Kansas City, Midwestern downtowns have been on the decline since forced desegregation, dating back to Brown v. Board in 1954 (see Clotfelter). Each big city is working towards renewal in their own ways. Most relevant here in St. Louis’ efforts, where a main downtown drag—Washington Avenue—has become a budding area for new bars, fancy restaurants, and airy lofts.

Sadly, apart from affluent yuppies and partying suburbanites, the place hasn’t reached sustainability. Which is why this has been such big news:

The new Schnuck Markets store set to open downtown on Tuesday is not your typical grocery…That’s because the supermarket, on Ninth Street across from the Old Post Office, is the first of its kind downtown since 1985. In the quarter-century since, the neighborhood has changed tremendously. It has fallen and bounced back, and in the last decade its residential population has doubled to roughly 11,000. But residents had to leave downtown to buy groceries.

Mixed-use development and other New Urbanist tendencies clearly hold great potential for places like St. Louis. So long as suburbanites can take of the easy risk of re-imagining the cities their relatives left long ago. And then take the hard risk of actually moving there.

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.

Fun with Health and Taxes

Many have already discussed the relationship between taxes and services, but with the health care debate turning near-mindless, it seems like a good thing to revisit.

There is a reality in the American political system. It is that high taxes will, more often than not, yield a high amount of public services. Conversely, low taxes lead to low-serivce locales. People tend to have a preference for one or the other, and vote accordingly. Residents of Bozeman, Montana, pay fewer taxes for taking out the garbage themselves, while those of Clayton, Missouri pay more to have theirs picked up from behind the house.

And a macro level, it works the same way. Americans pay certain federal taxes for a certain amount of services. Every day—generally speaking—politicians fight to for their chance to control this system of tax determination and service provision in the way they see fit.

So then a provisional health care bill comes up and elected officials begin to use the words “socialism” and citizens complain they do not want the government “running” big institutions (not assuming that is actually what the bill is about). That’s fine, and the scenario should be considered: no public health care option, understandably. No Medicare. No Medicaid. Tangentially, laws requiring businesses to provide maternity leave should be overturned, since this constitutes involvement in a health-related condition. Further, we should close the Postal system and especially the educational system, which lots of people claim is broken anyway. All public universities, funded by state and by default federal monies, should be closed as well. Finally, especially, ABSOLUTELY no more Social Security checks should be issued.

And actually, such a scenario fits perfectly into the high-tax high-service/low-tax low-service reality of the American political system. So if a person is going to argue that government involvement in health care is the wrong way to go, they should think about how a repeal of federal funding for institutions would actually play out. And vote accordingly.