"No More Heroes?" Topic

As unmanned systems eventually take more and more of a role in warfare, is the world entering a "post-heroic age" in which wars will largely be fought by machines?

Or will machines simply be a "force multiplier" for a necessary core of soldiers, sailors, and airmen?

Guerilla and insurgent wars will be fought at least by one side by people.

Until we need a "John Conner".

Read Stein's "Warbots" series. He has a good take on the future.

Machines will remain a force multiplier for a really long time, for IFF reasons alone.

I remember a short story where, in the Final Battle between Good and Evil, the Armies of the Faithful where robots/drones.

After the battle the fallen (the machines) were raised up to the heavens and the people left behind.

Read Stein's "Warbots" series.

I second that!

Post-Heroic Age?? Nonsense, Bill!

link

Grelber

Fighting battled perhaps but occupation duty would require humans because Machines are fast but linear thinkers in my experience… The bastard computers can not even multiply, they just add repetitively very fast… much less understand shades of expression.

"The bastard computers can not even multiply, they just add repetitively very fast"

Ummm, binary multiplication is accomplished by shifting the bits left and right.

You _can_ do repeated addition, but it is slow and inefficient.

But back to the OP, an inexorable trend in warfare is the use of machines, from rocks to pointy stick to crossbow to musket to rifle, machinegun, tank, mines, nuclear weapons, guided missiles….

Some of these require humans to operate, some don't. The extent to which human intervention will be replaced is impossible to determine however.

Personally I wouldn't be hugely comfortable with Skynet decided whether to launch a nuclear strike. Hilariously the UK military satellite comms sytems is called Skynet, I suspect someone had a sense of humour when naming it.

Patton asked a similar question … But I stil think regardless … you'll have those soldiers, sailors, etc. that will go above and beyond in certain situations. Of course the old saying of, "One man's Freedom Fighter is another's war criminal, etc.", or something like that may still be in effect … For example I see Kyle as an American Hero … I'm sure there are others and not just moslems, who think otherwise … shades of gray … again … Plus of course nobody goes out or tries to be a "Hero", but sometimes events occur and it just happens … so to speak …

No such thing as an unmanned system.

I remember a short story (or short novel) about a ship weapons office that taped a quarter to his computer console. (That's for those of you who remember 80's style arcade games…where you actually traveled to an arcade to play computer games.)

So I see the next generation of heroes weighing in at 98 pounds with bad complexions, wearing glasses and having socially awkward mannerisms. (Yes, that's stereotypical and meant to be funny, but probably failing. Par for the course, I'm afraid.)

There'll be heroes still, but they'll just have serial numbers instead of names.

Where I work, the names of heroes are still periodically engraved on a marble wall, sometimes as 'Anonymous,' There are still heroes.

Martin Rapier,

Thanks, I am happily researching this.

Is this what you meant?

"… In base 2, long multiplication reduces to a nearly trivial operation. For each '1' bit in the multiplier, shift the multiplicand an appropriate amount and then sum the shifted values. Depending on computer processor architecture and choice of multiplier, it may be faster to code this algorithm using hardware bit shifts and adds rather than depend on multiplication instructions, when the multiplier is fixed and the number of adds required is small.

This algorithm is also known as Peasant multiplication, because it has been widely used among those who are unschooled and thus have not memorized the multiplication tables required by long multiplication. The algorithm was also in use in ancient Egypt.

On paper, write down in one column the numbers you get when you repeatedly halve the multiplier, ignoring the remainder; in a column beside it repeatedly double the multiplicand. Cross out each row in which the last digit of the first number is even, and add the remaining numbers in the second column to obtain the product.

The main advantages of this method are that it can be taught quickly, no memorization is required, and it can be performed using tokens such as poker chips if paper and pencil are not available. It does however take more steps than long multiplication so it can be unwieldy when large numbers are involved…

and/or

Historically, computers used a "shift and add" algorithm to multiply small integers. Both base 2 long multiplication and base 2 peasant multiplication reduce to this same algorithm. In base 2, multiplying by the single digit of the multiplier reduces to a simple series of logical AND operations. Each partial product is added to a running sum as soon as each partial product is computed. Most currently available microprocessors implement this or other similar algorithms (such as Booth encoding) for various integer and floating-point sizes in hardware multipliers or in microcode.

On currently available processors, a bit-wise shift instruction is faster than a multiply instruction and can be used to multiply (shift left) and divide (shift right) by powers of two. Multiplication by a constant and division by a constant can be implemented using a sequence of shifts and adds or subtracts. For example, there are several ways to multiply by 10 using only bit-shift and addition…"

Always like to know when what passes as common knowledge might be inaccurate.

Also found link

and for yes and/but no answer – link

"… You see that while the computer in a sense multiplies by adding, it
doesn't do so by adding 13 + 13 + 13 + 13 + 13 +13 + 13 + 13 + 13…"

You can PM me or (preferred) contact me at Zorrogames AT att DOT net to avoid further derailment of this thread. I have not had to program anything serious since Pascal started being used to teach structured programming. This was kind of fun (in a 'headache inducing' way for non-math majors) to research.

So will damaging or destroying the other-side's Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems after they have been neutralized or captured be a "war crime" or a "crime against machinery"? Could we go to jail for breaking the L.A.W.S.?

Do not forget that the weapons of today become the law-enforcement tools of tomorrow. So maybe the Heroes will be found in the ghettos and slums of our own nations and they might not be wearing uniforms – just colours!

Ragnarok Robertson

If there are no heroes, we'll create some.
Seems to be a human trend.

Of course, hero is culturally relative.
Sometimes an enemy gets hero status while an ally does not.

"Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn

Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?
The great Elmyra,
And Sancho Panza?"

YouTube link