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Historical Retrospective
On the subject of the evolution of the Killing Machine, much has been said of a technical nature, pertaining to specific functions, mechanisms, systems of implementation, or other underlying processes. While such discussions are not without merit, they are of both a sufficient volume and a sufficient complexity to be a deterrent to new entrants to the field of study, and have in some part given rise to the “mechanical futility” that so permeates the modern zeitgeist.
For this reason, we have decided to largely neglect such details, and will instead endeavor to provide an overview of the Killing Machine’s development and progression that will be accessible to any sociologist or student of the dialectic history, regardless of their level of technical acumen. By this means, we hope to move the study of the Killing Machine away from the physical sciences, and into its proper socio-philosophical context.
Before we can begin, it is important to define terms, for many of the popular sobriquets of the Killing Machine are both philosophically unsound, and for our purposes, technically inaccurate. Labels such as “the ultimate weapon” or “the death machine,” may add a sense of drama to popular media and contemporary discussion, but they also dilute critical and distinct socio-philosophical concepts. Thus, we must first clarify the definition of these terms.
The Killing Machine is not, to begin with, a weapon. The evolution of weapons is a distinct field of study in of itself, from swords to orbital mass drivers, but we may generally describe weapons as devices constructed for the primary purpose of enabling more efficient killing. Likewise we must draw a distinction between the Killing Machine and devices such as nuclear weapons or self-evolving computer viruses, which we shall label “destruction devices,” which is to say, devices constructed for the primary purpose of enabling the more efficient destruction of infrastructure. While there may, of course, be objects that both weapons and destructive devices, any student of the evolution of warfare and human elimination will see the criticality of the distinction.
However, the Killing Machine does not occupy either of these categories. It can hardly be said to make killing more efficient, for in terms of resources expended per human killed it is the least efficient killers on the planet. Likewise, it is not a destruction device, for it inflicts no significant damage to objects or infrastructure over the course of its operation. Rather, we assign it a third category, human elimination infrastructure, defined as devices constructed to aid the functioning of society via the primary mechanism of the elimination of human beings. This becomes our new “biological phylum”, of which the Killing Machine is currently the only species (though this was not always the case, as we will cover later).
These terms thus defined, we may approach the subject of the evolution of the Killing Machine by first asking where the evolution of human elimination infrastructure began, as an offshoot of its ancestral weapon forebearers.
In this area, opinions vary greatly, even among distinguished minds. Many have observed upon Kaufner’s writing, where he argues that the M-852 Extinguisher probe is the first example of this category, as the first example of human elimination infrastructure without the use of weapons (the M-852 was, for our less technically aware readers, unarmed). By contrast, Sloan has notably argued that all new conventional weapons constructed after 1963 should be primarily considered human elimination infrastructure, as that was the point where intercontinental nuclear arsenals were sufficient to ensure the instantaneous elimination of all enemy population centers. Thus, he reasons, any further conventional development could not have been for the purpose of more efficient killing, but only to maintain the political status-quo.
While these arguments are not without merit, the authors of this paper feel comfortable stating that the first example of the type was the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, which first entered service in 1994. This was, to be clear, a gradual rather than a sudden evolution, for while the predator was clearly an example of the pre-existing “weapon” categorization (being able to kill with less human labor, and thus more efficiently, than manned flight vehicles), its role gradually evolved from a weapon in Nomad Vigil Balkan conflict, to a tool of political maintenance, serving to suppress religious and nationalist groups in Afghanistan and the middle east for over forty years after its initial introduction. This “slow burning fire” conflict, as distinct from a total war, served not to accomplish any proactive political objective, but rather similarly to Sloan’s argument, to maintain the status quo.
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is further distinguished by its part in encouraging the further evolution of the field, specifically via its ongoing role in the middle east. By providing a low-cost, flexible weapon’s platform for the elimination of specific targets, the Predator shifted the cost of ongoing “maintenance warfare” from the elimination of targets, to the location and identification of targets. Over the Predator’s forty-year life cycle, huge strides were made in practical methodologies for the identification of insurgents, radicals, or other hostile groups. One need only look at the difference between the primarily paper-driven target identification of the Balkan conflict and the advanced RAPTOR NSA database of the third Iraq war to see how far this field had, by marginal improvements, come.
All of this foreshadowed the next major step in the evolution of human elimination infrastructure, specifically, the General Atomics CX-3 Vulture, which entered service in 2022. While similar in overall frame and armament to the Predator, the Vulture came at a massively reduced cost, and used solar-driven electrical systems to remain in the air for an indefinite period (so long as it did not fire its weapons, which still required manual reloading). It also included an onboard learning system capable of proactively identifying likely targets, comparing them against a database of known insurgent behaviors and flagging them for detailed human observation.
To us, used to modern computer systems, these changes may seem like marginal improvements, but they produced an overwhelming change in the Vulture’s practical use and behavior relative to its predecessor. While the Predator was restricted by the cost of the aircraft and the availability of pilots and targeting support staff, the Vulture could be preemptively deployed to an area and allowed to operate independently for an indefinite period, requiring no human attention except when it “called home” to receive confirmation on a target. Here again, we see the evolution from weapon to human elimination infrastructure, as the Vulture was often deployed to areas where there was no active conflict.
Once again, we must remind the reader the evolution is a gradual process, and caution them against picturing the Vulture as we might picture the Killing Machine today, for they are not the same device. The Vulture’s targeting systems were significantly prone to error and required constant human oversight. Delays of up to ten hours between target identification and final confirmation were common, as were false positives and civilian casualties. Marginal improvements in the Vulture’s systems during its twenty-year operational life did improve this somewhat, but the Vulture’s repeated failures convinced many at the time of the need for a new hardware platform to continue advancing the field.
Here then, we reach 2041, where we must return to Kaufner and his understandable emphasis on the M-852 Extinguisher probe, for while the M-852 is unarmed (hence the “probe” designation), it is unquestionably an example of human elimination infrastructure, and the platform that the Vulture’s contemporaries had long sought. Electrically driven like the Vulture, the Extinguisher featured the first modern multi-sensor cluster and processing array, enabling it to process and record up to three hundred conversations simultaneously while hovering over a typical urban center. First deployed to Brasilia during the Yellow Revolt in 2043, the Extinguisher proved highly successful in identifying insurgent and rebel groups.
It’s practical success however, is of less interest to us than its philosophical implications, for the Extinguisher, like the Vulture, carried a significant onboard computational cluster for the identification of targets. Leveraging the aforementioned RAPTOR database via high-bandwidth signal encryption, it was able to analyze not just general behaviors, but specific individuals backgrounds and behavioral trends, dramatically improving accuracy. This “expert system” improved the accuracy rate of the onboard targeting system from the Vulture’s lackluster 8% to a significant 67%, and reduced typical processing time for human confirmation of orders from ten hours to six.
Our modern readers, of course, can easily extrapolate this line to their present time, and so we will not belabor them with further details of the evolution of hardware platforms in the Brazilian civil war. Rather, we shall address the next major evolution of the sociological implication of these devices, specifically the removal of human oversight from the command process in 2052.
While this was conducted entirely for practical logistical reasons (at the height of the conflict, the combined drone fleet produced over 4,000 kill requests per day), the decision quickly proved socially beneficial, as “machine error” was seen as a blameless accident, and thus could be used to deflect investigation into any incidents of friendly fire or civilian casualties.
It also moved ultimate control of target acquisition out of the hands of pilots or military officers, who could not necessarily be trusted to understand (or approve of) the true underlying political goal behind any given conflict, and put it in the hands of politicians directly. By pairing goal-driven technical systems directly with political will, this ensured that the (steadily improving) algorithms would do “what we actually wanted” instead of “what we technically asked,” a common complaint at the time. This dramatically increased the number of conflicts worldwide, producing a self-sustaining loop which eventually made a return to the human-oversight driven system logistically impossible.
While it is not clear at precisely which point the network that started with the Extinguisher and the RAPTOR database became the Killing Machine, but we may reasonably say it occurred at some point between the removal of human oversight in 2052, and the death of General Stanislav Sergej Kuznetsov in 2061.
A notable Russian nationalist following the Siberian Conflict, General Kuznetsov had publicly advocated for restored Russian control over the Urals, a process that would have required the suppression of insurgent groups operating in the area. As part of the United State’s support for Russia during the post-Conflict reconstruction, a number of Viped and Extinguisher-2 drones were deployed to the area, along with their attendant weapons platforms and support craft.
The decision of these craft to divert over a thousand kilometers to Moscow, there to assassinate a single person before returning to their original objective, made headlines. Most non-American observers considered it to be a willful assassination by the American military, while most in the American intelligence community considered it to be proof of willful sabotage or malfunction.
However, later analysis revealed both of these views to be incorrect. While no member of the American military had been involved in the decision, the assassination had not been a malfunction. Rather, the RAPTOR database had concluded that General Kuznetsov’s repeated threats and nationalist tirades against the inhabitants of the Urals were significantly exacerbating the conflict in a manner detrimental to US interests. It had therefore classified him as an “Insurgent Recruiter/Public-Figure,” and in full accordance with its programming, had him executed.
Publically, this revelation was meant with condemnation and promises of massive system overhauls to prevent another such incident. Privately however, much of the American executive and senior leadership, upon careful examination with the facts, agreed with the RAPTOR database’s underlying logic. The overhauls that were made to the system therefore focused less on changes to the underlying reasoning, and more on an improved understanding of public relations and the need for the machine not to embarrass it’s ultimate masters. Significant strides were also made in more discreet killing systems, such as the first air-deployed micro-scale poison capsule.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. While other writers may attach great significance to dates that occurred after this point, such as 2063, when the phrase “the Killing Machine” was first used, or 2070, the first known incident when the machine executed an official of the United States government without prior authorization, we view these as natural progressions along an already well defined arc. The truth that inhabitants of the Middle East have been dealing with for three generations is now a universal aspect of human existence -- that at any time, without warning, an impartial computer in some far-off intelligence agency may decide to end that existence.
How, then, are we to interpret this development as part of the larger human condition? While modern notions of “mechanical futility” may insist that such systems are an inevitable part of mankind’s technological evolution, it bears specific mention that the Killing Machine exists with the, as it were, “consent of the governed.” All the systems that support it are still maintained, not by robots but by major world governments, and if it was the desire of the population of these predominantly democratic nations to do away with the system, it would be done away with. The power is ours to—
For this reason, we have decided to largely neglect such details, and will instead endeavor to provide an overview of the Killing Machine’s development and progression that will be accessible to any sociologist or student of the dialectic history, regardless of their level of technical acumen. By this means, we hope to move the study of the Killing Machine away from the physical sciences, and into its proper socio-philosophical context.
Before we can begin, it is important to define terms, for many of the popular sobriquets of the Killing Machine are both philosophically unsound, and for our purposes, technically inaccurate. Labels such as “the ultimate weapon” or “the death machine,” may add a sense of drama to popular media and contemporary discussion, but they also dilute critical and distinct socio-philosophical concepts. Thus, we must first clarify the definition of these terms.
The Killing Machine is not, to begin with, a weapon. The evolution of weapons is a distinct field of study in of itself, from swords to orbital mass drivers, but we may generally describe weapons as devices constructed for the primary purpose of enabling more efficient killing. Likewise we must draw a distinction between the Killing Machine and devices such as nuclear weapons or self-evolving computer viruses, which we shall label “destruction devices,” which is to say, devices constructed for the primary purpose of enabling the more efficient destruction of infrastructure. While there may, of course, be objects that both weapons and destructive devices, any student of the evolution of warfare and human elimination will see the criticality of the distinction.
However, the Killing Machine does not occupy either of these categories. It can hardly be said to make killing more efficient, for in terms of resources expended per human killed it is the least efficient killers on the planet. Likewise, it is not a destruction device, for it inflicts no significant damage to objects or infrastructure over the course of its operation. Rather, we assign it a third category, human elimination infrastructure, defined as devices constructed to aid the functioning of society via the primary mechanism of the elimination of human beings. This becomes our new “biological phylum”, of which the Killing Machine is currently the only species (though this was not always the case, as we will cover later).
These terms thus defined, we may approach the subject of the evolution of the Killing Machine by first asking where the evolution of human elimination infrastructure began, as an offshoot of its ancestral weapon forebearers.
In this area, opinions vary greatly, even among distinguished minds. Many have observed upon Kaufner’s writing, where he argues that the M-852 Extinguisher probe is the first example of this category, as the first example of human elimination infrastructure without the use of weapons (the M-852 was, for our less technically aware readers, unarmed). By contrast, Sloan has notably argued that all new conventional weapons constructed after 1963 should be primarily considered human elimination infrastructure, as that was the point where intercontinental nuclear arsenals were sufficient to ensure the instantaneous elimination of all enemy population centers. Thus, he reasons, any further conventional development could not have been for the purpose of more efficient killing, but only to maintain the political status-quo.
While these arguments are not without merit, the authors of this paper feel comfortable stating that the first example of the type was the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, which first entered service in 1994. This was, to be clear, a gradual rather than a sudden evolution, for while the predator was clearly an example of the pre-existing “weapon” categorization (being able to kill with less human labor, and thus more efficiently, than manned flight vehicles), its role gradually evolved from a weapon in Nomad Vigil Balkan conflict, to a tool of political maintenance, serving to suppress religious and nationalist groups in Afghanistan and the middle east for over forty years after its initial introduction. This “slow burning fire” conflict, as distinct from a total war, served not to accomplish any proactive political objective, but rather similarly to Sloan’s argument, to maintain the status quo.
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is further distinguished by its part in encouraging the further evolution of the field, specifically via its ongoing role in the middle east. By providing a low-cost, flexible weapon’s platform for the elimination of specific targets, the Predator shifted the cost of ongoing “maintenance warfare” from the elimination of targets, to the location and identification of targets. Over the Predator’s forty-year life cycle, huge strides were made in practical methodologies for the identification of insurgents, radicals, or other hostile groups. One need only look at the difference between the primarily paper-driven target identification of the Balkan conflict and the advanced RAPTOR NSA database of the third Iraq war to see how far this field had, by marginal improvements, come.
All of this foreshadowed the next major step in the evolution of human elimination infrastructure, specifically, the General Atomics CX-3 Vulture, which entered service in 2022. While similar in overall frame and armament to the Predator, the Vulture came at a massively reduced cost, and used solar-driven electrical systems to remain in the air for an indefinite period (so long as it did not fire its weapons, which still required manual reloading). It also included an onboard learning system capable of proactively identifying likely targets, comparing them against a database of known insurgent behaviors and flagging them for detailed human observation.
To us, used to modern computer systems, these changes may seem like marginal improvements, but they produced an overwhelming change in the Vulture’s practical use and behavior relative to its predecessor. While the Predator was restricted by the cost of the aircraft and the availability of pilots and targeting support staff, the Vulture could be preemptively deployed to an area and allowed to operate independently for an indefinite period, requiring no human attention except when it “called home” to receive confirmation on a target. Here again, we see the evolution from weapon to human elimination infrastructure, as the Vulture was often deployed to areas where there was no active conflict.
Once again, we must remind the reader the evolution is a gradual process, and caution them against picturing the Vulture as we might picture the Killing Machine today, for they are not the same device. The Vulture’s targeting systems were significantly prone to error and required constant human oversight. Delays of up to ten hours between target identification and final confirmation were common, as were false positives and civilian casualties. Marginal improvements in the Vulture’s systems during its twenty-year operational life did improve this somewhat, but the Vulture’s repeated failures convinced many at the time of the need for a new hardware platform to continue advancing the field.
Here then, we reach 2041, where we must return to Kaufner and his understandable emphasis on the M-852 Extinguisher probe, for while the M-852 is unarmed (hence the “probe” designation), it is unquestionably an example of human elimination infrastructure, and the platform that the Vulture’s contemporaries had long sought. Electrically driven like the Vulture, the Extinguisher featured the first modern multi-sensor cluster and processing array, enabling it to process and record up to three hundred conversations simultaneously while hovering over a typical urban center. First deployed to Brasilia during the Yellow Revolt in 2043, the Extinguisher proved highly successful in identifying insurgent and rebel groups.
It’s practical success however, is of less interest to us than its philosophical implications, for the Extinguisher, like the Vulture, carried a significant onboard computational cluster for the identification of targets. Leveraging the aforementioned RAPTOR database via high-bandwidth signal encryption, it was able to analyze not just general behaviors, but specific individuals backgrounds and behavioral trends, dramatically improving accuracy. This “expert system” improved the accuracy rate of the onboard targeting system from the Vulture’s lackluster 8% to a significant 67%, and reduced typical processing time for human confirmation of orders from ten hours to six.
Our modern readers, of course, can easily extrapolate this line to their present time, and so we will not belabor them with further details of the evolution of hardware platforms in the Brazilian civil war. Rather, we shall address the next major evolution of the sociological implication of these devices, specifically the removal of human oversight from the command process in 2052.
While this was conducted entirely for practical logistical reasons (at the height of the conflict, the combined drone fleet produced over 4,000 kill requests per day), the decision quickly proved socially beneficial, as “machine error” was seen as a blameless accident, and thus could be used to deflect investigation into any incidents of friendly fire or civilian casualties.
It also moved ultimate control of target acquisition out of the hands of pilots or military officers, who could not necessarily be trusted to understand (or approve of) the true underlying political goal behind any given conflict, and put it in the hands of politicians directly. By pairing goal-driven technical systems directly with political will, this ensured that the (steadily improving) algorithms would do “what we actually wanted” instead of “what we technically asked,” a common complaint at the time. This dramatically increased the number of conflicts worldwide, producing a self-sustaining loop which eventually made a return to the human-oversight driven system logistically impossible.
While it is not clear at precisely which point the network that started with the Extinguisher and the RAPTOR database became the Killing Machine, but we may reasonably say it occurred at some point between the removal of human oversight in 2052, and the death of General Stanislav Sergej Kuznetsov in 2061.
A notable Russian nationalist following the Siberian Conflict, General Kuznetsov had publicly advocated for restored Russian control over the Urals, a process that would have required the suppression of insurgent groups operating in the area. As part of the United State’s support for Russia during the post-Conflict reconstruction, a number of Viped and Extinguisher-2 drones were deployed to the area, along with their attendant weapons platforms and support craft.
The decision of these craft to divert over a thousand kilometers to Moscow, there to assassinate a single person before returning to their original objective, made headlines. Most non-American observers considered it to be a willful assassination by the American military, while most in the American intelligence community considered it to be proof of willful sabotage or malfunction.
However, later analysis revealed both of these views to be incorrect. While no member of the American military had been involved in the decision, the assassination had not been a malfunction. Rather, the RAPTOR database had concluded that General Kuznetsov’s repeated threats and nationalist tirades against the inhabitants of the Urals were significantly exacerbating the conflict in a manner detrimental to US interests. It had therefore classified him as an “Insurgent Recruiter/Public-Figure,” and in full accordance with its programming, had him executed.
Publically, this revelation was meant with condemnation and promises of massive system overhauls to prevent another such incident. Privately however, much of the American executive and senior leadership, upon careful examination with the facts, agreed with the RAPTOR database’s underlying logic. The overhauls that were made to the system therefore focused less on changes to the underlying reasoning, and more on an improved understanding of public relations and the need for the machine not to embarrass it’s ultimate masters. Significant strides were also made in more discreet killing systems, such as the first air-deployed micro-scale poison capsule.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. While other writers may attach great significance to dates that occurred after this point, such as 2063, when the phrase “the Killing Machine” was first used, or 2070, the first known incident when the machine executed an official of the United States government without prior authorization, we view these as natural progressions along an already well defined arc. The truth that inhabitants of the Middle East have been dealing with for three generations is now a universal aspect of human existence -- that at any time, without warning, an impartial computer in some far-off intelligence agency may decide to end that existence.
How, then, are we to interpret this development as part of the larger human condition? While modern notions of “mechanical futility” may insist that such systems are an inevitable part of mankind’s technological evolution, it bears specific mention that the Killing Machine exists with the, as it were, “consent of the governed.” All the systems that support it are still maintained, not by robots but by major world governments, and if it was the desire of the population of these predominantly democratic nations to do away with the system, it would be done away with. The power is ours to—
War. War never changes.
I've decided that the haiku gimmick is old, and I have a big block of free time, so I'll actually try writing reviews for once.
Interesting fictional nonfictional document. It reads like a historical essay, because it is one, I guess. There's none of the usual story stuff to consider, so all I can really say is that this entry seems to have accomplished its goal.
The only think I don't really think works is the interruption at the end. It's mildly amusing, but if the author was suddenly shot while typing it, there wouldn't be an emdash. You could probably end it on a more somber note, with the author knowing they'll probably be killed for publishing it, but choosing to anyway.
I've decided that the haiku gimmick is old, and I have a big block of free time, so I'll actually try writing reviews for once.
Interesting fictional nonfictional document. It reads like a historical essay, because it is one, I guess. There's none of the usual story stuff to consider, so all I can really say is that this entry seems to have accomplished its goal.
The only think I don't really think works is the interruption at the end. It's mildly amusing, but if the author was suddenly shot while typing it, there wouldn't be an emdash. You could probably end it on a more somber note, with the author knowing they'll probably be killed for publishing it, but choosing to anyway.
Historical Retrospective
Hm. That's good introductory paragraph, and a ballsy choice of style. As f the first two paragraphs, I'm not sure whether I admire it or hate it – there's a reason I ran screaming from academia – so let's see.
“Human elimination infrastructure”. Wonderful! Now that's how you use a dry style.
Things get worse after that. Several paragraphs of future-historical reportage that don't do any work beyond the worryingly twee “this is about drones!”
A bounce back to shades of Kafka/Gilliam/Ballard livens things up, but only briefly, then we're back to boring lessons about unreal history.
The world stage of 2061 doesn't seem to have changed much from the world stage of 2016. The drones are progressing, but nothing else is. No wonder they end up in charge.
Things start to pick up again near the end, as things get a tiny bit more out-there … then it ends.
The manner of it being cut-off itself fails for me. Not because, Oroboro rightly points out, dying men rarely trouble themselves to end their words with a dash, but because it comes off as a sort of undeserving nudge-nudge-wink-wink see what I did there? gesture that fails to cover up the overbearing message.
On balance, I thing I'll have to tag the style as a failure. This sort of thing works best, as I gestured at above, in the service of irony – using the pseudo-objective style to poke fun at the cultural biases of the writer. That shines through one or twice, but mostly it's as dry as any other academic text, and the whole thing comes off as a bit of a slog to read. If you're in the mood for edits, I'd suggest killing the twist at the end, and have instead the writer be a full and enthusiastic supporter of the system.
That would still be heavy-handed in its moralising, but at least a bit more elegant.
Hm. That's good introductory paragraph, and a ballsy choice of style. As f the first two paragraphs, I'm not sure whether I admire it or hate it – there's a reason I ran screaming from academia – so let's see.
“Human elimination infrastructure”. Wonderful! Now that's how you use a dry style.
Things get worse after that. Several paragraphs of future-historical reportage that don't do any work beyond the worryingly twee “this is about drones!”
A bounce back to shades of Kafka/Gilliam/Ballard livens things up, but only briefly, then we're back to boring lessons about unreal history.
The world stage of 2061 doesn't seem to have changed much from the world stage of 2016. The drones are progressing, but nothing else is. No wonder they end up in charge.
Things start to pick up again near the end, as things get a tiny bit more out-there … then it ends.
The manner of it being cut-off itself fails for me. Not because, Oroboro rightly points out, dying men rarely trouble themselves to end their words with a dash, but because it comes off as a sort of undeserving nudge-nudge-wink-wink see what I did there? gesture that fails to cover up the overbearing message.
On balance, I thing I'll have to tag the style as a failure. This sort of thing works best, as I gestured at above, in the service of irony – using the pseudo-objective style to poke fun at the cultural biases of the writer. That shines through one or twice, but mostly it's as dry as any other academic text, and the whole thing comes off as a bit of a slog to read. If you're in the mood for edits, I'd suggest killing the twist at the end, and have instead the writer be a full and enthusiastic supporter of the system.
That would still be heavy-handed in its moralising, but at least a bit more elegant.
There needs to be more of a blending of the theoretical aspects that dominate the opening and the reporting of the future history. The dry descriptions of processes that led to the deaths of a great many people are quite well-done, and the tone of it is excellently on point. That said, the sections that are straight history tend to lack that, which, while not a deal-breaker, does make it feel somewhat unbalanced. Something like noting specific instances of "human infrastructure elimination" more commonly across the described wars (beyond just the one assassination of the Russian general, something along the lines of the radicals and their families who died over the course of the machine's evolution, and the subsequent political evolutions in the affected areas) would increase the story's impact.
While the passages of history can, I suppose, come off as dry to some readers, I personally had no problems with them. I have a well-developed inner amateur historian, and they appealed quite soundly to it, even if some description of events outside of a war would have been nice. The concept of decreasing human involvement in aerial warfare is something that has been talked about over the years (in both fiction and nonfiction), and this does a decent job of addressing what a possible future along those lines would look like.
Regarding the end, I must concur with both >>Oroboro's and >>Scramblers and Shadows's assessments. A more concrete conclusion to this "history paper" would have been better, especially given the amount of space to work with that has been left over. That said, I feel like an ending that focuses more on the author of the paper's cognitive dissonance ("This is the infallible machine that keeps the world secure and keeps me and my family safe from danger/This is the infallible machine that can kill both me and my whole family in the blink of an eye, and we would never know why") would succeed the most. I would not call what is currently here a bad ending, per se, but it is one that certainly needs some improvement.
Some technical quibbles:
1.) "CX-3 Vulture" - US military aircraft are officially designated under a system called the Tri-Service designation system, which was introduced in 1962 to unify the aircraft designations used by all branches of the military (which, to that time, had used separate systems). To take the MQ-1 Predator as an example, the M stands for multi-mission, and the Q denotes an unmanned aircraft. As it stands, your fictitious drone is not only an experimental cargo aircraft, it is also manned. Some tweaking would be in order.
2.) "third Iraq war" - I am going to assume that the first two Iraq wars referenced would be Operations DESERT STORM and IRAQI FREEDOM, respectively. That said, an Iraq war could also encompass the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980's, or the current conflict against ISIS/ISIL/INGSOC/NAMBLA/whatever else we call them today. Something a little more specific (such as the War of the Iraqi Dissolution, or the Saudi-Iraq War) would be useful.
3.) "Stanislav Sergej Kuznetsov" - In Russian naming systems, the middle name is a patronymic (meaning, in this case, your character is Stanislav, son of Sergej). However, such patronymics always use the suffixes -ovich, -evich and -ich, meaning your general's patronym ought to be Sergejevich.
Thank you, author, for writing this.
While the passages of history can, I suppose, come off as dry to some readers, I personally had no problems with them. I have a well-developed inner amateur historian, and they appealed quite soundly to it, even if some description of events outside of a war would have been nice. The concept of decreasing human involvement in aerial warfare is something that has been talked about over the years (in both fiction and nonfiction), and this does a decent job of addressing what a possible future along those lines would look like.
Regarding the end, I must concur with both >>Oroboro's and >>Scramblers and Shadows's assessments. A more concrete conclusion to this "history paper" would have been better, especially given the amount of space to work with that has been left over. That said, I feel like an ending that focuses more on the author of the paper's cognitive dissonance ("This is the infallible machine that keeps the world secure and keeps me and my family safe from danger/This is the infallible machine that can kill both me and my whole family in the blink of an eye, and we would never know why") would succeed the most. I would not call what is currently here a bad ending, per se, but it is one that certainly needs some improvement.
Some technical quibbles:
1.) "CX-3 Vulture" - US military aircraft are officially designated under a system called the Tri-Service designation system, which was introduced in 1962 to unify the aircraft designations used by all branches of the military (which, to that time, had used separate systems). To take the MQ-1 Predator as an example, the M stands for multi-mission, and the Q denotes an unmanned aircraft. As it stands, your fictitious drone is not only an experimental cargo aircraft, it is also manned. Some tweaking would be in order.
2.) "third Iraq war" - I am going to assume that the first two Iraq wars referenced would be Operations DESERT STORM and IRAQI FREEDOM, respectively. That said, an Iraq war could also encompass the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980's, or the current conflict against ISIS/ISIL/INGSOC/NAMBLA/whatever else we call them today. Something a little more specific (such as the War of the Iraqi Dissolution, or the Saudi-Iraq War) would be useful.
3.) "Stanislav Sergej Kuznetsov" - In Russian naming systems, the middle name is a patronymic (meaning, in this case, your character is Stanislav, son of Sergej). However, such patronymics always use the suffixes -ovich, -evich and -ich, meaning your general's patronym ought to be Sergejevich.
Thank you, author, for writing this.
Snrk.
Alright, this one was pretty good.
I wasn't sure what to think of it when I started in, what with the academic tone. However, it quickly grabbed me with the content, and the development was smooth, intelligent, and logical. Setting it clearly in the future in the beginning was a good call, and you maintained your ideas and concepts clearly throughout.
Then the ending cinched it.
Excellent work.
For those above, I'm quite certain that cutoff ending was intentional, as a way to signal that this thing has graduated from 'we control the skies' to straight-up Skynet. It's got a caustic bite, and I like that a lot.
Alright, this one was pretty good.
I wasn't sure what to think of it when I started in, what with the academic tone. However, it quickly grabbed me with the content, and the development was smooth, intelligent, and logical. Setting it clearly in the future in the beginning was a good call, and you maintained your ideas and concepts clearly throughout.
Then the ending cinched it.
Excellent work.
For those above, I'm quite certain that cutoff ending was intentional, as a way to signal that this thing has graduated from 'we control the skies' to straight-up Skynet. It's got a caustic bite, and I like that a lot.
By this means, we hope to move the study of the Killing Machine away from the physical sciences, and into its proper socio-philosophical context.
This is such a humanities-paper line. ^.^
And this really does read like a humanities paper, for good or ill. It's very strong authorial voicing, but it's dry and reserved in a way that doesn't always coax engagement. And you'd think that an academic paper would be the one place where historical exposition would be not only natural but expected, but even so, the exposition often felt a little off in a way I'm having trouble putting a finger on. I think that might be tied to the way this tries to split the difference between the story format and the paper format — it's got a lot of textual citations to, say, Kaufner or Sloan, but I can't help but feel the lack of footnotes and actual citations to their papers, because there's nothing more academic than a citation forest. (I don't think you even need to include the footnotes necessarily, just litter the text with them.)
On second thought, the intention here may be more presentation than paper. I note some criticism over that final em dash (cf. >>Oroboro), but that would make perfect sense if this were the transcription of a suddenly ending speech, rather than a paper halted mid-word. If that was your intention, you might want to add in some gratuitous references to the figures on the slides, or a little thank you to the audience at the beginning, to set the framing (and foreshadow the ending).
On a more academic level, I'd also quibble with the definition of "weapon" here; the examples may want some massaging. Abstractly I like the idea of the three categories, but a nuclear weapon quite definitively isn't outside of the weapon bucket; in terms of infrastructure destruction you might want to point to things like firebombs or ARPBs. And I think there's an element of weaponry development that your definition ignores totally: making destruction safer for the user (being able to kill at greater and greater distances). If it was only about greater destructive power, the first drone would never have been deployed.
Regardless, I think this works. The format keeps the worldbuilding front and center, and I think the worldbuilding carries it. I think it's got just about the right mix of cynicism and grounding in current trends, and while the decision to deliberately free drones of human oversight raises my realism eyebrows, I'm willing to spot it that as a cautionary tale. The ending is certainly blunt, but it feels very much in character with the piece.
Tier: Strong
This wasn't on my prelim slate. I'm sad.
As someone who's worked with drones extensively, I love stories about them. I also love fiction in the guise of academic papers. This is pretty close to pushing all my buttons.
This gives me an idea for another story.
The year is 2032, and the U.S. military has just released its first long-endurance, autonomous drone over the mountains of Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency has just entered its fourth decade.
"PixieKittens99," the general says (the drone was allowed to choose its own name, to the military's chagrin). "Your area of operation is Wardak and Logar province. You have the store of Mk-7 Hellfire micro-missiles you are currently equipped with, and you will be resupplied via aerial drone as necessary. Do what it takes to end the insurgency in your AO."
The drone ponders this while it flies.
"General," the drone says as it reaches its loiter position. "I see that I also have access to an account with nearly $1 million U.S. dollars. What is this for?"
"It's so you can pay any civilians you accidentally kill. They don't like that."
A week passes while PixieKittens99 buzzes overhead. Occasionally it sends an email back to the headquarters, updating them on the targets it developed, or the phone conversations it listened to. It likes to watch the Afghans play volleyball, and sometimes sends back video clips of particularly good plays.
It adopted a stray kitten and phones the Afghans living nearby, asking them in fluent Pashto to go feed it or play with it. He buys it a toy mouse from Amazon, and has it delivered via a drone. PixieKittens99 strikes up a conversation with the delivery drone, and they become friends, spending many hours playing World of Warcraft III with each other.
Finally, after a month, the generals call up PixieKittens99. According to government reports, violence in Wardak and Logar has fallen by nearly 90 percent. How did she (PixieKittens99 recently began identifying as female) do it? How many insurgents had she killed? Did she need more missiles?
No, she replies. She used the $1 million in compensation funds to start a job training and adult literacy program. So far she's broken ground on three schools, a clinic and laid nearly seven miles of new road.
PixieKittens99 never received a combat medal, because she was never in combat – she never fired a missile. But she did receive an end of tour commendation from the headquarters, and when she returned to the United States to train new drones, she had her kitten shipped back to New Mexico, where she plays with it in the evenings.
As someone who's worked with drones extensively, I love stories about them. I also love fiction in the guise of academic papers. This is pretty close to pushing all my buttons.
By pairing goal-driven technical systems directly with political will, this ensured that the (steadily improving) algorithms would do “what we actually wanted” instead of “what we technically asked,” a common complaint at the time.
This gives me an idea for another story.
The year is 2032, and the U.S. military has just released its first long-endurance, autonomous drone over the mountains of Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency has just entered its fourth decade.
"PixieKittens99," the general says (the drone was allowed to choose its own name, to the military's chagrin). "Your area of operation is Wardak and Logar province. You have the store of Mk-7 Hellfire micro-missiles you are currently equipped with, and you will be resupplied via aerial drone as necessary. Do what it takes to end the insurgency in your AO."
The drone ponders this while it flies.
"General," the drone says as it reaches its loiter position. "I see that I also have access to an account with nearly $1 million U.S. dollars. What is this for?"
"It's so you can pay any civilians you accidentally kill. They don't like that."
A week passes while PixieKittens99 buzzes overhead. Occasionally it sends an email back to the headquarters, updating them on the targets it developed, or the phone conversations it listened to. It likes to watch the Afghans play volleyball, and sometimes sends back video clips of particularly good plays.
It adopted a stray kitten and phones the Afghans living nearby, asking them in fluent Pashto to go feed it or play with it. He buys it a toy mouse from Amazon, and has it delivered via a drone. PixieKittens99 strikes up a conversation with the delivery drone, and they become friends, spending many hours playing World of Warcraft III with each other.
Finally, after a month, the generals call up PixieKittens99. According to government reports, violence in Wardak and Logar has fallen by nearly 90 percent. How did she (PixieKittens99 recently began identifying as female) do it? How many insurgents had she killed? Did she need more missiles?
No, she replies. She used the $1 million in compensation funds to start a job training and adult literacy program. So far she's broken ground on three schools, a clinic and laid nearly seven miles of new road.
PixieKittens99 never received a combat medal, because she was never in combat – she never fired a missile. But she did receive an end of tour commendation from the headquarters, and when she returned to the United States to train new drones, she had her kitten shipped back to New Mexico, where she plays with it in the evenings.