Autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots") were the basis for the Terminator movies and uncounted spinoffs and copycats. But the concept is achievable, and the potential consequences are unthinkable:
"A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.
There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don’t get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons.
They could be here in two to three years."
— Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California BerkeleyThat's the intro to a frankly unsettling article.
...lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS): weapons that have the ability to independently select and engage targets... humans out of the loop — where the human releases the machine to perform a task and that’s it — no supervision, no recall, no stop function.Much more in the link.
One of the very real problems with attempting to preemptively ban LAWS is that they kind of already exist. Many countries have defensive systems with autonomous modes that can select and attack targets without human intervention — they recognize incoming fire and act to neutralize it... Meanwhile, offensive systems already exist, too: Take Israel’s Harpy and second-generation Harop, which enter an area, hunt for enemy radar, and kamikaze into it, regardless of where they are set up. The Harpy is fully autonomous...
Among the lauded new technologies is swarms — weapons moving in large formations with one controller somewhere far away on the ground clicking computer keys. Think hundreds of small drones moving as one, like a lethal flock of birds...
I worry it will breed way more terrorist activities. You can call them insurgents, you can call them terrorists, I don’t care, when you realize that you can’t ever fight the state mano-a-mano anymore, if people are pissed off, they’ll find a way to vent that frustration, and they will probably take it out on people who are defenseless.
Reposted to provide addenda: The source link at Buzzfeed for this old (2017) post has undergone partial linkrot, but I'm going to repost the text as an introduction to this old (2018) video about "slaughterbots" -
It presents seven minutes of gradually increasing horror and is very similar in content to "Hated in the Nation" - my favorite episode of Black Mirror -
Posting both because this morning one of my cousins forwarded to me a substack presentation by "Blood in the Machine" entitled "Why the AI backlash has turned violent," which addresses recent physical assaults on various persons associated with AI and public anger against datacenters, including this comment:
"In the short time since I wrote that post, such pointed AI refusal has continued apace. Maine looks set to become the first US state to ban data center development outright. Form letters for refusing AI at work are circulating widely. Public polling of AI sentiment is in the gutter; it’s never been popular, and it’s especially unpopular now. A widely discussed NBC poll found that just 26% of Americans had positive feelings about AI; around half had negative feelings. Gen Z in particular loathes AI: For respondents aged 18-34, AI’s net favorability rating was minus 44."
I have some other offerings to present re AI, but will defer until later and just leave this post up for now.
We already have 'autonomous' weapons - they are called mines. Bury and forget, disturb and get!
ReplyDeleteThis is really scary!
ReplyDeleteStrangely the article didn't mention the recent test of the Perdix drone swarm in China Lake. If you haven't seen that yet you probably aren't properly scared yet.
ReplyDeleteSee also: Public fact sheet on Perdix.
See also the "locust" weapons mentioned here -
Deletehttp://www.washingtonexaminer.com/15-cool-new-military-weapons-joining-the-fight/article/2597524
- which I'll probably append to the post, but it's too nice a day outside to do so now.
If these things become easily obtainable, I don't think it will be what our standard definition of "terrorist" is. That is, there may be little or no political agenda. It just might seem like "fun" to some people; it might just seem like a get-even moment for some road rage incident, a bad grade in school, a cop who gave you a ticket.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm concerned, if they are used thusly, then, just as I wish would be done with those who use ransomware, we should make it a death penalty event (maybe not strictly via due process, but once certain people are identified...). Of course, I'm sure DARPA has gamed this out to some extent already. The problem is that asymmetrical warfare cannot be fully predictable.
just casually calling for capital punishment, and without due process, is an absolutely ridiculous statement to make. and all that while painting an image of an enemy who’d kill for the lulz, you couldn’t even satirise it.
Deleteit’s also wildly irreconcilable with christianity.
raphael
Raphael, with respect, when the stakes are so high as to be potential death of thousands of people, the goals and the rules become blunter. Yes, ideally we'd give them due process. However, this is why I think Trump may be the best president for the moment, despite how loathsome he can be.
DeleteLet's assume--and we have good reason to do so--that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb. We have the greatest sponsor terrorism on the GLOBE that, with a nuclear bomb, could either sit largely immune to strikes in response to their terrorist proxies...or increase the risk of a nuclear war if anyone did strike.
Most presidents have relied on diplomacy to try to resolve this. It has failed to deter Iran's sponsorship of terrorism. Make no mistake, Hamas' support comes from Iran in a huge way. These people targeted the innocent and unharmed. Yeah, diplomacy has failed.
One thing about Trump is that literally no one on earth thinks he wouldn't use a nuclear bomb if needed. That's terrifying to us and our enemies. But it just might be a good thing if an enemy realizes that if they cross some line, they will cease to exist. Horrible, I know. But perhaps necessary.
It is not at all irreconcilable with Christianity! For Christianity does take some of it's moral teachings from the Old Testament. "In the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every word be established." Let's use a scenario to see what's best....
We know, of course, that our PERSONAL behavior should always be governed by exactly TWO RULES: Love God; love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said that Law and the Prophets hang on those two things. Whenever in doubt about what to do, you can go back to those two rules.
Ask yourself this simple question: IS CHRISTIANITY AGAINST SELF-DEFENSE OR THE PROTECTING OF THE INNOCENT?
If you think so, then we have nothing further we can discuss. We are so far apart as to be speaking different languages. But if, as I trust, you believe that we would be morally bound to try to protect someone in danger or from grievous hurt, then, IF NECESSARY, we "shoot to kill" (or take some other extreme action.
If people are found to be purposely targeting people for death via drone, do we need to go through some process that just might release them on some technicality when, in truth, they have homicidal intent? Surely not!
As for ransomware, consider the person who has spent, say, ten years writing a novel...has precious, irreplaceable videos, photos, letters, emails, etc.... It is stolen from him. What if he can't pay the ransom? If it's $200, OK, maybe the person can pay and move forward more intelligently. But what about when they lock down a hospital that is providing life and death care? What about when the ransom is too high for you to pay?
Yes, those people deserve to die. NOT because we WANT THAT! We'd much rather them simply do the right thing by either no "kidnapping" anything at all...or by returning it. But if they don't....
And if they continue doing it...then, if we can get the info some other way, fine (even waterboarding--they deserve it). But if not, and before they can do more damage, you are stopping them from doing massive damage to innocent people. They are, in a very real sense, terrorists.
You may see it differently. Yes, if we could give them due process without a guilty person getting off because they have a good lawyer, then fine. But consider, too, that most executions take place DECADES after the crime. In fact, sometimes after the parents of a murdered child have already died themselves.
Our goal is to do RIGHT. Due process is typically the right way to go. But sometimes an evil person has to be stopped before they can be arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, and sentenced.
i’ll keep this somewhat short: no.
Deletethe absolute maximum extent to which justified killing can be pushed in christianity is bonhoeffer’s: if there is a murderous, genocidal tyrant very much like the one he was facing in his lifetime, a christian can not say ‘because murder is sin, i must let him continue his atrocities’, it means that his christian duty forces him to commit the gravest sin. this is very specifically not about it being ‘all right’ to dish out death or torture.
myself, i’m a fan of more stringent argumentation, such as schopenhauer’s: no human individual nor one of their institutions wields the stature to judge another’s death, no matter how righteous they imagine themselves to be. what you dish out so lightly, who deserves what sort of atrocity being done to them, is a fundamental impossibility.
but as you very astutely observed, we don’t speak the same language. we don’t even inhabit a shared reality. trump is not the best president, not of the moment, not in general, not by any other metric. the lack of hingedness in that statement frightens me.
raphael
Codex: Scifi is not an instruction manual.
ReplyDeleteWeapons developed for war a driver of technology should be prohibited for civilian use.
The regulation should be in place before such technology is sold. I'm thinking about what happened with automatic weapons. Lessons not learned.
Three laws of robotics?
Codex: As to AI even the tech sector is warning about it.
ReplyDeleteWhat AI robot could and should be is Nolans TARS rather than HAL.
In related news: Ukraine just claimed its first autonomous victory on the battlefield. They got a Russian group to surrender without having any Ukrainian soldiers on the ground.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/insight/ukraine-claims-first-battlefield-win-using-only-robots/gm-GM457D2235?gemSnapshotKey=GM457D2235-snapshot-53
I did see a little clip with Zelensky proudly explaining what happened, but you'll have to do with the meek link above, cuz I can not find that back.
And since I'm mentioning Zelensky, I have to also report he is in the Netherlands today to receive a Four Freedoms award. Gisèle Pelicot got one as well. This is a big Dutch-American award, handed out by the PM, in the presence of the King who just got back from a sleepover in the White House earlier this week.
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/4113265-zelensky-receives-four-freedoms-award-in-netherlands.html
These four freedoms come from a speech given by FDR.
The whole calculus of war has been based on: I believe that you are so wrong in your beliefs that I am willing to die (send people to die) because of your beliefs (my beliefs). Over the past 20 years, however, the math has changed. We can leverage dollars over lives. On it's face, that is a good thing. As you go deeper, you run headlong into killing people because it is economically possible. Full stop. The deep sentiment of being willing to die or send people to die has eroded to having a bad feeling or actuating an economic policy via war. We are in the pot of boiling water.
ReplyDelete