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DeepMind, Elon Musk and Others Pledge Not To Make Autonomous AI Weapons (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Yesterday, during the Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Future of Life Institute announced that more than 2,400 individuals and 160 companies and organizations have signed a pledge, declaring that they will "neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of lethal autonomous weapons." The signatories, representing 90 countries, also call on governments to pass laws against such weapons. Google DeepMind and the Xprize Foundation are among the groups who've signed on while Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman have made the pledge as well.
"Thousands of AI researchers agree that by removing the risk, attributability and difficulty of taking human lives, lethal autonomous weapons could become powerful instruments of violence and oppression, especially when linked to surveillance and data systems," says the pledge. It adds that those who sign agree that "the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine." "I'm excited to see AI leaders shifting from talk to action, implementing a policy that politicians have thus far failed to put into effect," Future of Life Institute President Max Tegmark said in a statement. "AI has huge potential to help the world -- if we stigmatize and prevent its abuse. AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons, and should be dealt with in the same way."
"Thousands of AI researchers agree that by removing the risk, attributability and difficulty of taking human lives, lethal autonomous weapons could become powerful instruments of violence and oppression, especially when linked to surveillance and data systems," says the pledge. It adds that those who sign agree that "the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine." "I'm excited to see AI leaders shifting from talk to action, implementing a policy that politicians have thus far failed to put into effect," Future of Life Institute President Max Tegmark said in a statement. "AI has huge potential to help the world -- if we stigmatize and prevent its abuse. AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons, and should be dealt with in the same way."
The pledge is not worth the paper its printed on. Believe me, once Elon sees a way to make a shit load of money through AI-based weaponry, he'll take action.
Including mine. I'll make two separate devices. One is an AI logic unit that can track threats in real time and determine the optimal kill shot. This device will have an expansion port that receives the data but is unused.
I will also make a fully electronic machine cannon that is fucking deadly and controlled by a human remotely with a joystick or some other type of digital control mechanism. This device will also have an expansion port that will allow control to be received via it as well.
I can't help it if someone clever realizes that if you run a USB cable between the two, it's a neat hack that allows it to function as an autonomous AI killbot.
All it takes is one.
-SM
someone calls him out on twitter. /rimshot
While obviously big players in AI would be able to help develop military AI way faster than without them the hard reality is that this technology already in the wild. And as long as there's a federal government there's going to be corporations mercenary enough to peruse this technology. And this doesn't even take into account the programs of other nation's militaries.
Of course you might have some motion on international agreements on the use of military AI. But much like nuclear weapons there's no feasible way to truly put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. And that's even before we start talking about the idea of rouge actors. That 'SlaughterBot' video that Elon Musk helped fund was overly hyperbolic bullshit. But that doesn't mean they'll never be a group that doesn't come up with autonomous weapons.
Putin says the nation that leads in AI 'will be the ruler of the world'
How about we at least look into some ways to defend against this?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
AI weapons that autonomously decide to kill people are as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons,
Weapons that indiscriminately kill people are are terrible, and only made by the most deplorable, and dispic- wait, I go lost there, was I ranting about multi-stage boosted yield MIRV thermonuclear weapons, or robots with glocks?
I mean, lets put this in perspective here. We spent half of the last century trying to figure out more ways of incinerating major cities more efficiently, and a few assholes are worried that we are going to build the robot from short circuit?
GET YOUR FUCKING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT, IDIOTS!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'm confused. Didn't Elon fall off everyone's carelist after his twitter gaf the other day?
You would completely disregard a person in all venues because they said a mean thing on Twitter? Allowing your feelings to blind you is a weakness.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Crude forms (as in old technology by modern standards, not as in "ineffective") of AI are already in use, and not just recently either.
The last version of the Canadian frigates (first one hit the water in 1990), which are already being replaced with a newer version, used a set of in-house designed operating systems with triple redundancy (three specific OSes, each of which can operate the ship alone, and three independent networks, etc each of which can operate the ship alone). Although the details are not made public, rumour has it that they are various flavours of UNIX.
One feature of the ship is it can track and target threats (air, sea and subsea) and fire when all personnel are no longer physically capable of operating the ship. As in dead.
Most navies have built similar (and newer) ships since, with technology that operates the same way (including the US, UK, etc).
Sounds like an AI weapon system to me.
Literally, look at the topic. At this point, if you're not working on weapons, you're just setting yourself up to lose the future war, where competitors will not be so internally weak minded as to not research useful tools for warfare.
As it has always been in human history. Decadent empires starting to think they can afford to not match upcoming adversaries is one of the key steps on the path to collapse of said decadent empires.
You realize, of course, that this means they are already making them. God damn it. See... This is why we can t have nice things. I would love if this were true, if I could believe these people. I would also love a big piece of double chocolate fudge cake, but that s not on the table either, nor is it likely to be. Figures this would be how it ends. Whatever evolves in the next few hundred million years to replace us, would be well advised not to do stupid shit like we did, but the same evolutionary forces that formed us will form them, and they will, given enough time, do the exact same thing.
It is, I firmly believe, not a unique thing endemic to humans, but rather it is a function of the forces that brought us about. The single, thin, feeble ray of light glimmering in all this gloom and impending doom is this: I think I just solved Fermi s Paradox. This is why we here are not inundated with visitors from other planets. Because shortly after a species develops intelligence, it develops science and technology, and shortly thereafter, its natural inclinations towards individual survival at the expense of others drives them to create increasingly intricate and sophisticated and powerful weapons, and you can only have those for so long, and in such abundance, and so widely proliferated, before someone does something earth-shatteringly fucking stupid with one, and all else follows unavoidably from that error.
Case in point: by rights, humanity should have ended at the Cuban Missile Crisis. We, as a species, lucked out there. Ever since we have all collectively been living on borrowed time. Inasmuch as it seems that with each passing year, there get to be more ways for all of us to die, as a species, more individuals who can have a bad day and, or can go nuts and, or who can just get really bored and... kill everyone on Earth, it becomes increasingly apparent that the odds of seeing another year get smaller with each passing year. This is simply how probability works. You can back out of a driveway into traffic without looking and get away with it if there doesnâ(TM)t happen to be someone trying to occupy the space you are trying to back into, at that moment or immediately thereafter, but I would not count on being able to pull such a stunt repeatedly. It eventually catches up with you and I am frankly surprised it has not caught up with humanity yet. But hey, climate change... if killer robots fail to wipe us out, there is always everyone starving to death as we further and further outstrip the natural carrying capacity of the planet, (see Malthus, Thomas,) and become more and more ludicrously dependent on technology to manage to keep us all fat and happy, when it all comes tumbling down... it is going to get horrifically ugly.
You have my permission, therefore, to get drunk now. I know I m going to.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
They are still working on automated vehicles. Doesn't anyone think about how easy it would be to turn an automated vehicle into a weapon?
Put a bomb in the trunk, use the automated vehicle to get it to the target, and a cell phone to track/detonate the bomb when it gets there...
And any image recognition system, once advanced enough, can be easily adapted to a targeting system.
Even if they don't want weapons, the technology they do continue to work on will sooner or later make it's way into weapons.
The only question is who will have access to them first.
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.