Violence, to begin with, is dehumanizing. To bypass empathy and aim violence at a person, you must consider your target more an object than a person.
Technology not only increases the amount and the range of violence we can inflict, but it improves our psychological ability to inflict violence. Consider road rage. Driving a car, even otherwise non-confrontational people become aggressive. The distance from the face-to-face interaction affords a person the room to let loose the inhibitions, ignore social rules, and indulge in one-upmanship.
While the benefit of tanks, unmanned aircraft, and combat robots is the reduction of casualties on one side, it increases the dehumanization of the enemy, which is already to blame for war crimes, for torture, for the killing of civilians. In the history of warfare, anything that removes the human face from the violent act only increases the amount and degree of violence. Airstrikes, even “strategic” ones, kill civilians. Of course, we call them “collateral damage,” not people. Wars staged with aircraft and few ground troops are easier to sell to the public because of the lower casualty rate (on “our” side), but do we really want to make warfare palatable?
violence is dehumanizing
Violence, to begin with, is dehumanizing. To bypass empathy and aim violence at a person, you must consider your target more an object than a person.
Technology not only increases the amount and the range of violence we can inflict, but it improves our psychological ability to inflict violence. Consider road rage. Driving a car, even otherwise non-confrontational people become aggressive. The distance from the face-to-face interaction affords a person the room to let loose the inhibitions, ignore social rules, and indulge in one-upmanship.
While the benefit of tanks, unmanned aircraft, and combat robots is the reduction of casualties on one side, it increases the dehumanization of the enemy, which is already to blame for war crimes, for torture, for the killing of civilians. In the history of warfare, anything that removes the human face from the violent act only increases the amount and degree of violence. Airstrikes, even “strategic” ones, kill civilians. Of course, we call them “collateral damage,” not people. Wars staged with aircraft and few ground troops are easier to sell to the public because of the lower casualty rate (on “our” side), but do we really want to make warfare palatable?