ErosBlog Bacchus
Shortly after 9/11 when I first became aware of combat drones (then mostly light RC aircraft firing missiles, usually at the weddings/funerals of the families of supposed enemies of the United States) I had the one obvious thought:
"This Is Fine™ but what happens when the supposed enemies of the United States start DRONING BACK? When tiny drones swarm & shoot bullets at the heads of important personages from six inches away? How will we like it? We will not like it."
I still have this thought.
ErosBlog Bacchus
No, I don't have a snappy conclusion. I'm just thinking "those stupid fuckers have opened a Pandora's Box that could change the world, and I've had this feeling before, and I was right."
Hang on to your asses, comrades. And learn to whittle.
ErosBlog Bacchus
Consider for a moment the nightmare shared so widely by serious computer scientists, who have confronted the fact that it's fundamentally impossible (or at least more difficult than we can manage) to verify what a compiler does, which means that code written in high-level languages (all of it) is deeply untrustworthy.
Now imagine that lack of trust given substance in the physical world. Anything you didn't make yourself might be a bomb, and there's no practical way to check or rule it out.
ErosBlog Bacchus
20 years after I thought "woah, these drones are going to be an enormous pain in the ass once everybody has them" we are watching a drone-enabled revolution in military affairs unfold in Ukraine/Russia. Give it another 5, 10, 20 years? It's possible that the state monopolies over use of force that enabled/created the Westphalian system of sovereign states will have collapsed under that technological stressor.
Supply chain injection of microexplosives might do the same thing to global trade.
ErosBlog Bacchus
I felt then, and still feel, as if the early adopters of a dangerous military technology did not give enough thought to the consequences TO THEMSELVES of introducing a technology and thus encouraging several decades of the usual refinement, miniaturization, and encheapening.
I mention this now because I'm having the same thought about another new military technology: supply chain attacks that inject explosives and control systems covertly into the global system of trade in small goods.
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