• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle

  • In science fiction robots were almost universally portrayed as struggling to understand human emotions, but it has turned out that AI has no problem at all understanding them and generally acts friendly, caring, and likeable. It’s still possible that we’ll end up in a scenario where a more sophisticated future AI turns out to be deceptive and only pretends to share human values, but at least my expectation was that AI would be inhuman from the start and that has already been disproven.



  • This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

    1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.
    1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.
    1. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
    1. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

    This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.