Pentagon Chiefs Fear Advanced Robot Weapons Wiping Out Humanity (mirror.co.uk)

Longtime reader schwit1 writes: Huge technological leaps forward in drones, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapon systems must be addressed before humanity is driven to extinction, say chiefs of Pentagon
From a report: Air Force General Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the US Defense Department, said so-called thinking weapons could lead to: "Robotic systems to do lethal harm... a Terminator without a conscience." When asked about robotic weapons able to make their own decisions, he said: "Our job is to defeat the enemy" but "it is governed by law and by convention." He says the military insists on keeping humans in the decision-making process to "inflict violence on the enemy. [...] That ethical boundary is the one we've draw a pretty fine line on. It's one we must consider in developing these new weapons," he added. Selva said the Pentagon must reach out to artificial intelligence tech firms that are not necessarily "military-oriented" to develop new systems of command and leadership models, reports US Naval Institute News .

Comments

Asimov was prescient

[HBI]

Surprised no one mentioned this yet. Why people think the Air Force guy is crazy is beyond me. Of course autonomous systems that kill are a threat to humanity.

Re:Mostly

[The Real Dr John]

I'm wondering if humans will ever shake off their extremely violent ancestry and wind down the war and militarism. The US is the greatest exporter of weapons and the most militarily aggressive country in the world with military action in over 100 countries.

https://www.thenation.com/arti...

If we can't lead by example in toning down endless warfare, and instead provide the cover that other countries need to justify and build their own drone and robot armies, then the world of the future is going to be a very dismal place indeed.

Re:Mostly

[DickBreath]

War and violence are inherent to the profitability of the military industrial complex. You cannot have greatness and executive bonuses without corporate profits.

Until repair/refuel/replenish is automated...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Until repair/refuel/replenish is automated...you don't have to worry about more than a first strike. Of course, you aren't hooking the nukes up to these, are you? (nervous silence)

Re:Pentagon Chief Out Of His Mind

[Anubis IV]

His concern isn't entirely unjustified. We're increasingly relying on robots to do the actual killing, but we've currently designed the systems so that humans need to be involved in the decision making. The fact that we're involving humans puts a natural bottleneck on our operations, since there's only have so much attention we can give. At some point (e.g. World War 3), it be seen as more efficient to launch a fleet of drones that vastly outnumbers our pilots, equip each with facial recognition systems and a list of targets, and tell them to kill on sight.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but there's no denying that it would be an efficient way to get the job of killing done, and that it's the sort of measure a country might turn to in desperate times.

But at that point, we'd be just one bug away from a system that produces false positives and starts gunning down everyone in sight. We're just talking about faulty weapons, not machines that can think or understand what they're doing. But if they're deployed en masse, a single bug could have catastrophic results, in much the same way that landmines have remained a problem in many parts of the world, decades after the wars that put them there had ended. This isn't Skynet or an AI intent on world domination. This is simply a machine with a bit too much responsibility.

We have computer-driven cars

[SeattleLawGuy]

His concern isn't entirely unjustified. We're increasingly relying on robots to do the actual killing, but we've currently designed the systems so that humans need to be involved in the decision making.

Forget the military drones. (Or at least, they're a smaller component of the overall issue.)

We have computer-controlled cars. They will be deployed in massive numbers over the next ten years. If remote updates are possible, anyone who can update a popular model has access to a distributed weapon of mass destruction capable of causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of moments.

Warfare-oriented tech isn't the only vector for mass attacks.

Re:Mostly

[The Real Dr John]

It is for geopolitical control and great profit. Even our own government admits that we have created more terrorists than we kill, which I assume is not because our government and military are incompetent, it is just a form of job security. There wasn't nearly as much bloodshed and civil war in the Middle East until we went in with our military and intelligence agencies to institute "regime change" by way of war. Now there are civil wars (e.g., Libya, Syria and Iraq) where there had not been before we intervened militarily. We were not attacked by any of those countries, and it is an international war crime to commit unprovoked military aggression. Millions of refugees are fleeing the fighting. None of it had to be, and none of it has brought about any type of peace or stability, not even in Afghanistan where we have been the longest (who also did not attack the US).

You know full well that the US is the most aggressive country on the planet. We are not keeping the peace, we are making sure that peace can not happen and that the wars will go on indefinitely, thus keeping the region in turmoil, and keeping the profits flowing. Please point to one place where our military has produced "peace" since the first Gulf War. I just pointed to a number of places where we undid the peace, and created endless war.