The only thing which keeps you alive is the unwillingness of your neighbors and those who surround you to kill you. The law might punish them afterward, but extensive research has shown that it provides no disuasion to people who are actually willing to kill someone.
A military AI being used to wipe out large numbers of people is exactly as 'inevitable' as the weapons we already have being used to wipe out large numbers of people. The exact same people will be making the decisions and setting the goals. In that scenario, the AI is nothing but a fancy new gun, and I don't see any reason to think it would be used differently in most cases. With drones we have seen the CIA, a civilian intelligence agency, waging war on other nations without any legal basis, but that's primarily a political issue and the fact that it can be done in pure cowardice, without risking the life of those pulling the trigger, which I think is a distinct problem from AI.
Killing people when neither they nor their friends can retaliate is easier. Being able to say do X or I kill you, without the other party having a defense that will even inconvenience you gives you a shitton of power.
Military AI would basically be nukes without the fall-out or collateral damage.
Saying "humans have spied on each other for centuries" is nothing but a distraction for how far beyond what should be legal mass surveillance is, because it makes it so easy to have everything on everyone all the time. It's nothing like pass targeted surveillance. If anything it's much more like Stasi-style surveillance, but on a much bigger and more indepth scale. And we already know how dangerous such surveillance is with the wrong person leading a country.
When war becomes easy and cheap (to the attacker), you'll just end up having more of it. It doesn't help the the military industrial complex constantly lobbies for it either.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119041067045765832...
As far as predicting the future goes, I can't.
AI doesn't change this it just makes it easier.
Some people find that scary, and it may seem like a shaky thing to stake your life on. But, firstly, you have no choice. Secondly, it works for billions of people and has kept us safe for tens of thousands of years. Even after we developed the knowledge, tools, and ability to kill millions at the push of a button.
What would we do if a drone made by a no-name manyfacturer dropped some bombs in Times Square? Who would we blame when someone uses AI to actually sow social mistrust and subvert our existing systems?
In fact, the only reason such drone attacks don't happen, or why people hadn't been casually blowing each other up for the past five decades with explosives attached to RC cars / planes is that in general, people are nice to each other. There's plenty of tools out there for dedicated people to wreck havoc in populated areas. Such people simply are very, very rare.
Well, for the rest of the world, state actors wreaking havoc with drones and AI with inpunity is already a problem.
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumati...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/28/life-us-drone-...
It doesn't seem substantively different from destroying a target via long-range missile or via a laser-guided bomb dropped from a human pilot flying thousands of feet over head. All three are impersonal ways of killing other human beings from a mostly-safe distance – especially in our modern asymmetrical engagements.
I agree that it feels gross to imagine a soldier sitting in a skyscraper pulling a trigger to kill people half way round the world, and it feels odd for someone to kill people in the morning and go home to sleep their bed that night, again and again, day after day. But military commanders have effectively been doing that since we've had faster-than-horse battlefield communication. So, I'm not convinced this is some brave new world of impersonal killing.
HOWEVER, I get the problem with drone warfare. Drones provide commanders with several benefits (no human casualties on "our" side, generally great accuracy, relatively low cost, etc.) that let them scale up the killing with minimal public outcry. This seems a real problem.
I guess my point is that the problem is not drones. The problem is killing so many people with so little oversight and so little apparent concern – whether by Cruise missile, drone, nanoswarm, T2, whatever.
I'd reword your sentence to be: "how we collectively became accepting of our governments casually killing our fellow humans half way round the world is remarkable"
To be fair, it's a small step from effective AI that doesn't malfunction, to an AI over which humans have lost control. It's precisely one vaguely specified command away in fact, and humans are quite excellent at being imprecise.
A rogue AI's "oxygen" is electrical power, which is really kind of fragile. The emergency power for most datacenters won't last more than a few days without replenishing diesel fuel.
For a distributed threat, take out fiber with backhoes. Happens every day now, we just happen to repair it. Stop fixing cuts and it's "Dave, my mind is going...".
Of course you have to deal with the AI making contracts with maintenance crews of its own, and do all this before it hardens its power supplies. But our current infrastructure is definitely not hardened against low to moderate effort.
The Matrix of the original film was originally envisioned as a bootstrap AI, in which the machines were farming humans for their collective processing power - and the simulation that was the Matrix was integral to this purpose, as it served as an operating system for the imprisoned human minds. However, the film's backers felt that concept was too complex for the average moviegoer, and forced the change to "humans = batteries."
But, the canonical Matrix would be too inefficient to actually work. The amount of energy needed to maintain a human being over the course of an entire lifetime far surpasses the amount of energy that can be harvested as body heat - and adding some kind VR simulation over that just to keep people who are already physically trapped from "escaping" would just a pointless waste of resources.
Antennas and solar panels can be smashed, but they can also be protected, since they would be mostly concentrated in one area.
Throw in EMP hardened circuitry, and things get a bit harder to destroy.
Sure, but nobody thinks AI is a threat right now. They're claiming AI could be a threat in the near future, which is entirely reasonable.
And with battery tech improving steadily, and solar now becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, it becomes progressively easier to depend solely on disconnected, distributed power generation which is resistant to exactly the kind of attack you're suggesting.
We can certainly argue the probabilities of such an outcome, but I hope we can all agree that it's not outright implausible. Which doesn't even count the dangers of AI for our economy, which are even more plausible. So overall, AI has the potential for much harm (and much good of course).
In Nuremberg we developed a way to think about this: people outside the central circles of power have a tremendous amount of pressures they are considering. It's definitely the case that some are sadistic and horrible, but more are just following orders and trying to get by as best they can, and punishing them for war crimes is not appropriate.
The other side of that coin is that it isn't realistic to expect soldiery en masse to resist illegal orders. It's always more complicated than that.
And then there's always that soldier ready to denounce his camarads for having raped some poor Vietnamese women who had nothing to do with the war itself. Why risk such a PR disaster which might see your funding cut when you can use robots instead? Warzone robots don't snitch on their fellow robots in front of the press and they don't rape, they're only build to kill.
Actually, the unwillingness of the Red Army to do any more invasions was arguably the precipitating factor in the fall of the Soviet empire. In 1988, Gorbachev gave a speech to the Warsaw pact meeting where he told them that the Brezhnev doctrine was no more. No socialist government would be able any longer to count on Russian aid in putting down popular uprisings. A year later, the empire crumbled. Of course, it wasn't the soldiers per se who refused, but the generals who were afraid of the potential mutinies (and the occasional actual ones).
And economic problems were a big incentive for everyone in charge to step back from wars. For country's with a strong economy there would be little incentive to stop, especially if AI makes war cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles#Principle...
What horrible things to you have in mind that armies have not already done?
We speak of Nazis frequnetly, but consider what Curtis LeMay did in war and prepared to do after the war.
AI and robots give plausible deniability and reduce the number of witnesses. They also make suicide raids more practical.
Or American death squads in Afghanistan. Might as well call them rape and death squads.
What about Guantanamo?
Srebrenica?
Should I go on?
How unenlightened and naive are you?
Which is why President Obama pivoted to a drone war in areas like Pakistan. Scores of Pakistani civilians are killed on a regular basis for crimes no worse than standing next to a tall bearded man or attending the funeral of a neighbour. The American public has no issues with this because hey, it's cheap to deploy the drones and no American lives are ever in jeopardy. And to be fair about it, apart from the high collateral damage, the Drone War in Pakistan is generally considered to be successful at inhibiting the Pakistani Taliban.
This Drone War was the first successful war that we've seen fought without boots on the ground. It's likely that we'll see many more like this as on-board AI improves.
Currently there's a high cost to it. War is very expensive; even the richest country in the history of the world, the US, doesn't want to bear the costs. And it requires persuading masses of soldiers to go along with it.
Roboticized warfare might eliminate those constraints.
However, that depends on the people between the president and nuclear launch being decent human beings that care about law and order and proper procedure. You need to look at the system, not just individuals.
Alternatively, let's say someone came to power who genuinely believed nuking Russia was a good option. Rather than order a launch on the spot, what they'd actually do is gradually build a case, appoint pliable or similarly thinking people to key positions, get the launch protocols revised, engineer a geopolitical crisis by provoking Russia and drive events towards a situation in which a nuclear launch seems like a legitimate option.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
You might say "sure, but there are people who have to actually execute those orders." But give the Pentagon some credit--those are people who have been systematically selected because they follow orders quickly and without question. For example, consider what happened to Harold Hering when it became obvious that he was not one of those people.
Anyone power that has significant leverage over another power already has that ability.
A bunch of 'super smart evil AI robots' will not be able to physical deter/control 500 million Europeans - but - a small Army of them would be enough to control the powers that be, and from there on in it trickles down.
Much the same way the Soviets controlled Poland et. al. with only small installations. The 'legitimate threat of violent domination' is all that is needed.
So - many countries already have the power to do those things to many, many others via conventional weapons and highly trained soldiers. That risk is already there. Think about it: a decent soldier today is already pretty much a 'better weapon' than AI will be for a very, very long time. And it' not that hard to make decent soldiers.
The risk for 'evil AI robots' is that a non-state, inauthentic actor - like a terrorist group, militia etc. gets control of enough of them to do project power.
The other risk I think, is that given the lack of bloodshed, states may employ them without fear of political repercussions at home. We see this with drones. If Obama had to do a 'seal team 6' for every drone strike, many, many of those guys would have died, and people coming home on body bags wears on the population. Eventually the war-fever fades and they want out.