Slashdot Mirror
Killer Robots Would Be 'Dangerously Destabilizing' Force in the World, Tech Leaders Warn (washingtonpost.com)
Thousands of artificial intelligence experts are calling on governments to take preemptive action before it's too late. The list is extensive and includes some of the most influential names in the overlapping worlds of technology, science and academia. From a report: Among them are billionaire inventor and OpenAI founder Elon Musk, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, artificial intelligence researcher Stuart Russell, as well as the three founders of Google DeepMind -- the company's premier machine learning research group. In total, more than 160 organizations and 2,460 individuals from 90 countries promised this week to not participate in or support the development and use of lethal autonomous weapons. The pledge says artificial intelligence is expected to play an increasing role in military systems and calls upon governments and politicians to introduce laws regulating such weapons "to create a future with strong international norms."
"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," the pledge says. "Moreover, lethal autonomous weapons have characteristics quite different from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the unilateral actions of a single group could too easily spark an arms race that the international community lacks the technical tools and global governance systems to manage," the pledge adds.
"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," the pledge says. "Moreover, lethal autonomous weapons have characteristics quite different from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the unilateral actions of a single group could too easily spark an arms race that the international community lacks the technical tools and global governance systems to manage," the pledge adds.
>> introduce laws...with strong international norms
Why not structure it like the international mine treaty? You know, the one that pretty much everyone except the USA has agreed to.
(rolls eyes at idea that Russians/Chinese won't use AI-augmented weapons to their full advantage)
It is too late.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Is a good robot with a gun. If you take the guns away from the good robots, then only the bad robots will have the guns.
The biggest autonomous "robots" deployment is going to be fully autonomous cars. Many pundits are predicting that autonomous cars are the future and once you have autonomous cars, owning a car would be lot more expensive than ride sharing services. They are predicting that US car ownership can reduce by 50-80% and ride sharing services running millions of autonomous cars. Imagine if someone can break into a large ride sharing service and start all the autonomous cars and direct them on pedestrians... It can be far worse than 9/11.
It's not the killbots that are gonna get ya, it's the sexbots that are going to lead to your extinction.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Create killed Robots.
Putin pinkie promised!
You could rewrite that 70 years in the past and substituting "Killer Robots" by "Nuclear weapons", and make the same arguments, and even some arguments being proven right in hindsight.
But technology will mature when it's ready to do so, and no amount of hand-wringing will change that. And anyway, if I they want to choose a dangerous tech to get all anxious about, hands down it should be "genetically engineered viri" rather than "killer robots". At least with a robot you can shoot back.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Warnings about military and political catastrophe by people who know nothing about the military, or politics, and automatically assume that anyone who does must be evil and stupid.
How could we possibly survive with the infinite wisdom of Silicon Valley! Just ask them.
In other words, it's a day that ends in "y."
This is a complete non-story. There's no content. They're not wrong, so much, as they have nothing to say at all.
FTFY.
Seriously, the rich are already thinking about a post capitalist society where the working class doesn't factor in. Automated weapons are the way to go. You keep a few engineers on staff to monitor them and pay the engineers well. Unlike the captains of your private military they lack the ambition and charisma to overthrow you.
Meanwhile the rest of us will just be screwed. Think living like the American Indians on the res except without the casinos. If you want to prevent that now's the time. Start demanding a decent quality of life for everyone. Establish it as a basic human right. Or cast your eyes to the reservations circa the 1900s because that's your future. Me? I'm 40 and come from a short lived family. I'll be long gone.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.
Obviously.
grade arguments.
I'd suggest to all of them, they'd better fix their products before dreaming in some sci-fi movie concept from the 80s.
There are already sentry guns. We can already program drones to drop payloads autonomously. We already have killer robots, and we do not even need AI to make them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Very few devices today are truly open source software free. The open source community should start rolling anti-weaponization provisions into all open source licenses. Problem solved.
"Unless AI robots get vastly more flexible rapidly, seems to me that large armies of nasty humans are still a much bigger threat (albeit one we've lived with since time immemorial)."
Robots don't have to live up to our abilities, because they don't have to cope with our particular drawbacks. They can be smaller and more numerous, for example. They don't have to be individually more capable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why not structure it like the international mine treaty? You know, the one that pretty much everyone except the USA has agreed to.
You know that you're full of shit when your "almost everyone" doesn't include China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and both Koreas, amongst a list of 30+ countries. You know, only about half of the planet.
You know you're doubly full of shit when out of that list of 30 countries the only one you specifically name is also the only one which has publicly stated that they will abide by the terms of the treaty even though they will not officially ratify it.
Amazingly enough, despite all that, you're still not as full of shit as the countries which HAVE ratified the agreement yet continue to stockpile dual-use antipersonnel landmines such as the claymore, because these are apparently "OK". Particularly entertaining is the fact that Canada - the nation which originated the treaty - still stockpiles claymore mines.
But hey, why waste a good opportunity to ignorantly bash the US, right?