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Musk, Woz, Hawking, and Robotics/AI Experts Urge Ban On Autonomous Weapons
An anonymous reader writes: An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute urges governments to ban offensive autonomous weaponry. The letter is signed by high profile leaders in the science community and tech industry, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, and Frank Wilczek. It's also signed — more importantly — by literally hundreds of expert researchers in robotics and AI. They say, "The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce."
Like the summary says, nuclear weapons require expensive and hard to obtain raw materials and a significant amount of technology not common in the civilian space. This is the only reason, IMHO, that nuclear proliferation treaties work as well as they do. How does this group expect governments to keep a lid on military tech that relies on ubiquitous technology found throughout the civilian economy?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Instead, it is the rise of a human psychopathic tyrant working with a force of soldiers that obediently kill at his command, with no chance of moral rebellion within his own force.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
One of the things that has consistently mystified me about Americans' complacency with drone warfare is the underlying assumption that our current monopoly on drones is going to last forever. If it's ok for the U.S. to use drones to assassinate "terrorist" anti-American agitators in Yemen, what are we going to say when China starts using drones to assassinate "terrorist" Chinese dissidents on American soil, or Europe, or elsewhere? For all intents and purposes, we're already using killbots, and the really important point here is that airborne killbots can be used (for now) with impunity across borders.
"American Exceptionalism" basically means we allow ourselves to commit war crimes with impunity.
That ship has sailed a LONG time ago... We've been making such weapons for decades.
What's a mine? What's a cruse missile? Proximity fused ground to air shells? Homing torpedos? What's all that "fire and forget" stuff we've been building?
I'm afraid the cows are ALREADY out of the barn on this....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The moral high ground is a killzone, should hostilities break out.
You can't "ban" something that consists of little more than putting together some guns, some standard AI, and some standard robotics platforms. There is no way to detect violations of this ban. It's like trying to ban the use of electric motors in offensive weapons. Good luck with that.
The main purpose of such a ban is to make a bunch of people feel good about themselves and to let them demonstrate to the world what wonderful and important humanitarians they are.
... Okay... so... you have an option to use a kill bot against the enemy that wants to kill you... and if you go out there... you could be killed.
Or... you send in your terminator bot and worst case they scrag the robot.
What are you going to prefer here?
A lot of people offering opinions here are not speaking from that perspective. They're speaking often as not from the perspective of some civilian ideologue that knows they're not going to go to war.
I know that if I go to war... I am going to want the best weapons my society can make for me along with the best defenses the best training and ideally leaders that are not complete fuckwits.
That means I want the robots. I want them and I want them to be fucking vicious.
Go on youtube and you'll see US soldiers cheering when air support shows up and blows the fuck out of someone shooting at them.
https://youtu.be/1IcvjD4VVjY?t...
Now... if you are a country that has the ability to build kill bots... and you might be on the firing line... do you or do you not want to use killer robots to kill your enemies?
You have to put your brain into war mode to understand the question.
My vote... is yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
When I go to war... I go to WAR.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This is an absolutely inane idea for several reasons:
a) They already exist; you can't defend against a sea-skimming missile or SRBMs without an autonomous system, People are just too slow.
b) Bad actors are not constrained by treaties. They'll cheat. We'd be damn fools to put ourselves at a disadvantage.
What makes more sense is to have a discussion about how they're used and how they're employed. I think it's plausible that they be prohibited from being autonomously travelling or that they must have a human authorize them to continue engaging every hour or day. An outright prohibition is just polyannaish claptrap.