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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."
I don't see how it won't be easy for anyone to retrofit a postal drone to.. go postal.
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.
I just don't see the point. These will be developed, and no amount of banning them will stop it or even slow it down.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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
{Unless of course} They run on Windows
Which would be a valid reason to introduce a new international treaty on "Crimes against sentient AI" under which to prosecute those cruel enough to subject a poor AI to running on a Windows platform~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Start with land mines. These are autonomous weapons with little or no AI and have done far more devastation to civilian populations.
The AI arms race will basically be to develop more accurate enemy identification. The "low" tech AI will have more "friendly fire" incidents than the "high" tech AI.
The old game of nethack warned not to genocide shopkeepers. If you genocide them you would kill all humans, including your own character. This seems applicable to AI autonomous weapons.
On the other hand, a theoretically competent AI running a weapon could make choices of not engaging despite a command or even an attack on it because of the risk of civilian or collateral damage. A human holding a weapon would not necessarily be able to make the dispassionate trade of self-sacrifice for some number of strangers or monuments.
Prominent world politicians urge adoption of new changes to the C++ standard concerning private inheritance and templates.
What this is trying to do is imply that because they have technical expertise in how dangerous AI-controlled weapons are, that technical expertise makes them experts about political decisions concerning weapons. It doesn't, and there is no more reason to pay attention to them than to the average guy in the street (who understands that some weapons are dangerous, and may have opinions on their use, but certainly doesn't get a national press release about it).
... 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.
It's similar to the situation at the end of WWI. Versailles called for wide-ranging disarmament among all the belligerents, which was all well and good in theory. In reality, of course, a great deal of the R&D that had gone into new weaponry; tanks, planes, ship designs, and so forth, still existed. In fact, the most valuable commodity of all, the German plans for the 1919 campaign that never was, still sat in archives, just waiting for someone to come along and dust them off.
The cat is out of the bag, has been out of the bag for a few decades now. When most of us look at devices like Mars Rovers, we're impressed by the technology and science, and yet that very same technology is easily adaptable to building autonomous weapons. Even if the Great Powers agreed, you can be darned sure they would still have labs building prototypes, and if the need arose, manufacturing could begin quickly.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
We don't have to kill ISIS, just distract them until they're 60 or so.
Cheaper yet, we should be airdropping porn, pot and pizza. The three P's of victory!
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