732
The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
732 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
59582 readers
4135 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you program an AI drone to recognize ambulances and medics and forbid them from blowing them up, then you can be sure that they will never intentionally blow them up. That alone makes them superior to having a Mk. I Human holding the trigger, IMO.
Unless the operator decides hitting exactly those targets fits their strategy and they can blame a software bug.
And then when they go looking for that bug and find the logs showing that the operator overrode the safeties instead, they know exactly who is responsible for blowing up those ambulances.
And if the operator was commanded to do it? And to delete the logs? How naive are you that this is somehow makes war more humane?
Each additional safeguard makes it harder and adds another name to the eventual war crimes trial. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, especially when it comes to reducing the number of ambulances that get blown up in war zones.
It doesn't work like that though. Western (backed) military can do and does that unpunished.
Here is a sample of US drone killing civilians
Israeli general: Captain, were you responsible for reprogramming the drones to bomb those ambulances?
Israeli captain: Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!
Israeli general: Captain, you're just the sort of man we need in this army.
Ah, evil people exist and therefore we should never develop technology that evil people could use for evil. Right.
Seems like a good reason not to develop technology to me. See also: biological weapons.
Those weapons come out of developments in medicine. Technology itself is not good or evil, it can be used for good or for evil. If you decide not to develop technology you're depriving the good of it as well. My point earlier is to show that there are good uses for these things.
Hmm... so maybe we keep developing medicine but not as a weapon and we keep developing AI but not as a weapon.
Or can you explain why one should be restricted from weapons development and not the other?
I disagree with your premise here. Taking a life is a serious step. A machine that unilaterally decides to kill some people with no recourse to human input has no good application.
It's like inventing a new biological weapon.
By not creating it, you are not depriving any decent person of anything that is actually good.
It's more like we're giving the machine more opportunities to go off accidentally or potentially encouraging more use of civilian camouflage to try and evade our hunter killer drones.
Right, because self-driving cars have been great at correctly identifying things.
And those LLMs have been following their rules to the letter.
We really need to let go of our projected concepts of AI in the face of what's actually been arriving. And one of those things we need to let go of is the concept of immutable rule following and accuracy.
In any real world deployment of killer drones, there's going to be an acceptable false positive rate that's been signed off on.
We are talking about developing technology, not existing tech.
And actually, machines have become quite adept at image recognition. For some things they're already better at it than we are.
Did you know that "if" is the middle word of life