Congressional UAV Caucus Courts Robot Voters

Its amazing how quickly UAV has become a common term and almost taken for granted when they were not even on the radar screen 4-5 years ago. "These Congressmen realize that computers will eventually attain consciousness" this is a stretch and the past 40-50 years do not suggest we will reach this point in the near future.

Next they are gonna have the exo-skeleton cuacus.

uav's have been around approximately 100yrs,although were called radio- controlled,& used in 1st world war as mainly target practice, during ww2 they were more like uav's & usually full scale replicas of combat planes,or vehicles. good to see that america is taking uav's seriously; as i have said before, mothers,wives,sisters & other family members, would rather uav's were brought home in bodybags so to speak.
uav's are good for more than just combat, air & sea rescue, firefighting; especially with massive forest fires lately;
seems strange, some people get hot under the collar when uav's are used in war, but when a very similar process is used every day in airliners (autopilot),thats just considered technology advancement

@lousephyr

Try to see it from a pilot's standpoint: People become aviators to fly in the skies themselves (most of the time without regard to what they're loved ones think), not to fly a RC plane from a computer screen.

Granted, the use of UAVs in military operations has proven to be completely beneficial for success in several nations, but warfare is meant to be ugly and gruesome. You could replace the sailor with a robotic submarine, and the grunt with a robotic rover armed with an assault rifle, and there will still be loss of human life. Even if combatants on both sides of a war were to use technology to remove the human component out of fighting, war becomes a sport. Nothing would stop us unless their is a prize to be garnered which would be at the cost of human life.

War is not about the fighting, it's about destroying your enemy's will to resist. Without combatants, targets of attacks by technology would be civilian communities, because that would destroy the enemy's will to fight: watching innocent people die at the hands of armed combatants, human or drone (this is why we don't fight wars on our own soil).

No one likes to see their loved ones killed in combat, but they make the choice to serve their nation, which is a personal sacrifice in itself. These individuals are intelligent and know what they're getting themselves into. Those who want to be aviators don't need someone trying to make their jobs safer for "their own good." People choose to be pilots because they want to fly.

That being said, civilian application of inherently military technology would not be excepted in the civilian world (maybe except for law enforcement recon) because you can force military aviators out of planes for the good of a mission, but you won't drag a pilot alive away from their plane. As I said, people choose to fly because they want to. They love it, and will rebel and fight to the end against the ideology of replacing the human component (along with the human spirit of exploration and adventure) of flight with a robot. Besides, people can fly rescue choppers, firefighting aircraft, just fine. There's no need for drones there.

BTW, autopilots don't fly planes themselves. The number of autopilot related accidents is proof of how a compotent (and I do repeat the word compotent so that you get the full meaning) set of pilots is necessary to operate an aircraft carrying a bunch of people.

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