With this proliferation of know-how, technology, and weaponry, warfare is changing. A cheap commercial drone equipped with weapons, guided by another cheap drone packed with sensors, can hit specific faraway targets or conduct surveillance operations. And because they are relatively inexpensive, such aircraft can be deployed at scale.

It’s not just MRIs and cell phones that enjoy innovation. As with medicine, so goes the killing. One thing has remained true — as Günther Anders put it: “our capacity to feel hobbles along behind our capacity to do: we can indeed rain bombs on hundreds of thousands; to regret or weep for them we cannot.”

I wrote an essay on this topic 7 years ago called “Blips on a Radar Screen,” which I put up on the bigger blog.