Warfare by robot

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, can be operated by a kid sitting at a computer with a joystick in an air force base in Gloucestershire or Arizona, who can kill people and then go to the canteen for lunch.

There's a day conference in London on September 18th on drone warfare. I quote from the blurb: “Armed drones are used by Britain, US and others at great human cost and often in breach of humanitarian law. Used in war and for targeted killings this technology is being used by the UK with little public debate.”

The conference will cover Britain's arms industry and drones, the use of surveillance drones in the UK, Israel's use of drones in Gaza and elsewhere, international law and drone war, the future of robotic weapons, local campaigning.

Date: Saturday 18th September 2010, 10am - 4pm Venue: University of London Union, Malet Street Cost: (includes buffet lunch) £10.00/£6.00 conc 

More information: http://www.for.org.uk/files/dw-flyer.pdf 

Prometheus and the art of storytelling

It turns out there's a lot more to the Prometheus story than I thought. In the first place Prometheus it seems was a friend to mankind, he didn’t bring fire just to pursue a personal vendetta as I've suggested. Also his story is tied up with Pandora’s box, which was how Zeus punished mankind for acquiring fire.  So there’ll be a substantial revision and addition in due course.

I'm wandering into a byway now and I'm puzzling over the art or storytelling, and the origin of the Greek myths.  Firstly, how do you identify the “official” version of each story, secondly how far can you legitimately stray in the retelling?  For Greek myths Homer and Hesiod are (I believe) normally regarded as the authoritative versions. For now, lets just say it was Hesiod. The question is where did he get the stories from? Round the fireside when he was a child I suppose.  It would be “tell us the one about Prometheus and the fire” and “tell us the one about Pandora’s box”. And each visiting storyteller would embellish the tale in their own way, depending on their skill, their mood, how they judged their audience on that particular night, and other factors. So by the time the adult Hesiod picked up a pen he would have heard a dozen versions of each story. And at some stage, Hesiod, or if not him then someone, decided to weave Prometheus and Pandora’s box into one story, even though the two stories were in their origin entirely distinct. Is that how it worked?

Is there a way to get back to the underlying oral tradition that preceded the stories being written down? Presumably not. So perhaps I can defend any departure from the official version by saying, well yes this may not be the way Hesiod told it (or the Bible, in the case of Adam and Eve) but I've given you a plausible hypothetical reconstruction of ONE of the many versions that Hesiod heard before he wrote down the definitive account of Prometheus.

This is just musings. There will for sure be some academic work on this subject that I need to check out. But I'll be surprised if my musings are far from the mark.