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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

That’s the problem with mutually assured destruction weapons (which AI bots most surely qualify as). If you accept as a given that at least one faction is building them, then the other factions’ only choices are: 1. Build your own and pray for a Cold War stalemate and 2. Don’t build your own and guarantee you’ll be destroyed.

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MAD was based on the concept of the 'Nuclear Club' - the barrier to entry was the mass defect ratio, which you'd have to calculate on your own, and then you'd confront nation-state level expenses of turning that knowledge into practical engineering. It had an inherent cap on the number of possible players. Not saying it was nice, it was just manageable. The barriers to entry here are much lower. For smaller players, lethal drone prices would be at the several hundred dollar range with a six digit investment in infrastructure, and I'd have full confidence in American defense contractors to drive that price much lower, in order to protect their margins, and at scale, they'll mess up their inventory control. The only choice is to recognize as a species this cannot be done, or it will be done. This equation is not about the few agreeing not to kill the many, it is about the many realizing that this is a road to an extinction level event. I don't mean to be dramatic, but I have a system I could make kill if I wanted to, and I paid for the whole thing on credit cards. Its too easy and too efficient. The number of players can't be counted on one hand, it's a tech lone individuals could deploy. If they do then others will, you net an exponential growth rate in deployment, and then the game is over. At the end of the day, all of the pieces are already here - a motivated individual can do a lot of damage, several motivated individuals or groups can get into a squabble and the damage rises exponentially. It is simply not an avenue we can accept. The limit to entry is not financial, it is not technical, it only can be that we must not. I'm pleased Google has defined their ethics as a company, I just argue in this case we need to define our ethics as a species. We cannot build these because if we do they will get loose, they will be used, and it will be a tragedy. We must all agree that arming autonomous machines is beyond the pale, for any one, for any reason. As soon as one is built, your destruction is guaranteed, regardless of whether you too build one. .

I guess my point is (and it looks like we agree): good luck getting all billion+ people on the planet with a credit card to agree that building a kill bot is a bad idea. All it takes is for one of those people to disagree, build them, and then we all must have them.

>All it takes is for one of those people to disagree, build them, and then we all must have them.

A killbot is (more or less) a mobile booby trap. If we have a problem with madmen leaving booby traps around, we can't solve that by laying more booby traps.

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