In the past, multitudes of young American men - including a high proportion of West Virginians - suffered the grotesque slaughter of warfare in many conflicts. The toll of death and maiming has been tragic.
Now, however, war is shifting to robotics - killer drones, cruise missiles, laser targeting, guidance from satellites, etc. There's less need for soldiers on the ground.
Push-button warfare has many advantages: It puts fewer American lives at risk. It allows more pinpoint accuracy to spare civilians. It reduces "friendly fire" casualties of other Americans. It prevents violent revenge attacks upon civilians loosed by agonized U.S. troops.
Push-button war still requires human controllers to push the buttons. But fast-growing artificial intelligence soon will create killer machines that operate on their own, without humans commanding at video screens.
On Tuesday, more than 1,000 world scientists signed an open letter urging governments to halt progress toward self-controlled death instruments.
"Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention," the letter said. "They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria ... . The stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms."
The scientists warned that self-operated weapons may "become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group."
Signers of the open letter include renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, Tesla Motors creator Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and many pages of AI specialists. In the past, Hawking and Musk have issued public warnings that ultra-sophisticated, self-programming, self-repairing computers may develop an ability to create "weapons we cannot understand."
Frankly, we don't know if this scientist letter can halt the stampede toward more efficient killing systems. No government wants to let others gain an advantage. But the warning should be pondered solemnly by thinking people everywhere.