[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

It is sad that there are people around who think the whole world is made up
of "behaviours" and numbers, and who are in denial about the importance of
culture and social construction in human action.  People who are evidently
most at home with machines and know nothing about the analysis of social
life.

So, we have a sci-fi future with computers which do not require inputs or
programmers, and which never have bugs or backdoors.  These perfect
computers accumulate vast quantities of data on desert nomads and mountain
clans, not to mention the millions of slum-dwellers without computers.  They
then deploy aggregate models which somehow manage to eliminate variation for
individual difference, despite the fact that they only know numbers, not
people.

Meanwhile, those of us who think that people and societies can be understood
by studying people and societies realise that these computers will go the
same way as all the other attempts at clumsy social engineering, that they
will turn out to be unable to handle a million complexities which don't fit
in the parameters they are given, and that they will turn out to be the
robotic little brothers of the rational-choice morons who have proven
incapable of saying anything useful about politics and society for the last
several decades.  By which point they had bloody well better know how to
make themselves invisible, so the companies/strategists/politicians who are
using them don't think to come for the wall-plug.  (Oh wait.  More naivete
on my part.  They're bound to be powered by self-refuelling warp drives.)

The only people stupid enough to think that people are predictable, are
people who are boring enough to BE predictable.  And who have only ever
bothered to look at "behaviour" in *mass* societies, where the people around
them have also been made stupid and boring.  They're in for a shock when
they go waltzing off to Afghanistan and get pwned for the umpteenth time,
though someone should really tell them that they won't respawn again
afterwards.  Unless robo-buddy got fed up with his stupid companions and did
a Kurtz, that would be hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLm6oTCFcxQ
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