Moral Gray Areas and the Rise of Terminators

February 17, 2019 Kevin Patrick

BBC recently published a piece on autonomous robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. For those who remember the Terminator movies, this discussion is a bit unsettling.

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The issue of autonomous weapons is vastly different than the moral issues over drone warfare. Drone warfare is presently oversee by military personnel making decision to strike. Many argue the gray moral issues of drone warfare but it is hard to argue that drone warfare does not lessen civilian deaths in war. In WWI the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths was nearly 50%. In WWII, the ratio was 65%. Precision weapons, while not totally “precise,” are not what indiscriminate fire was in former conflicts. Novelists are always looking for the next gray area to weave into a story, this seems like a pretty interesting one!

Research, Research and More Research

January 20, 2019 Kevin Patrick

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There’s nothing that will jar me from a good story than an implausible premise or a faulty fact. Novelists are storytellers. The story we tell has to immerse the reader in a believable world. There may be fake news but there are no fake facts. It’s either fact or fiction - research discerns the difference.

Russian Intellegence is Looking Like A Cartoon

October 9, 2018 Kevin Patrick

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Two GRU officers photographed staring into a London street CAM at the site of poisoning of two Russian dissidents. One of the two reportedly had been awarded a medal years earlier by Putin. Then a car load of GRU officers are caught red-handed in the Hague trying to hack into the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - a treasure trove of phones and laptops seized. Several of the team’s passport numbers were sequential.

While Russian Intelligence is far bolder and active under Vladimir Putin, it is looking more like an excerpt from the old Bullwinkle Show!

Tiger Droppings and the CIA

October 2, 2018 Kevin Patrick

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I couldn’t resist passing on something I read about the CIA during the Vietnam War. Evidently, in the 1960s and 1970s the Indochinese tiger population in Veitnam was robust. The Agency needed a way to track VietCong and the NVA. They came up with a seismic detection device that would identify troop movements. The problem though was how to disguise something that was not native to the surroundings but wouldn’t be noticed, or at least scrutinized.

The detection device was designed to look like tiger droppings.

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BBC recently published a piece on autonomous robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. For those who remember the Terminator movies, this discussion is a bit unsettling.

While Russian Intelligence is far bolder and active under Vladimir Putin, it is looking more like an excerpt from the old Bullwinkle Show!

The detection device was designed to look like tiger droppings.

Tiger Chips! That’s some cool %#!!