US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons
thebulletin.org
thebulletin.org
Safety critical systems - including nuclear bombs - need to be simple, with realistically-understandable deterministic behavior. The answer to "what would our nuclear weapons do in ${any_hypothetical_situation}" should never be "I don't know".
Even worse, if an "AI" is involved (by any definition of "AI"), that means the control system involves a Turing complete language. Asking questions about the behavior of the control system for a given set of inputs probably shouldn't require solving the Halting Problem.
edit: I suspect these so-called experts need to read the report[1] from the Therac-25 investigation.
You mean humans?
Jokes aside this idea is awful.
Come on down this fall it’s going to be scorching out. I mean the sky will literally be on fire as your mind explodes from both radiation and the insane surelism that was terminator!
The solution is to eliminate them entirely and stop creating such insane choices.
Sure, how do you propose to do that?
That solution entails magically ensuring that no one else has such weapons or will develop them.
If we had a way of doing that, we wouldn't even need armies protecting borders. You'd still need minimal border security to ensure individual intruders don't make it through, but why maintain a hugely expensive army if you could ensure that nobody else could create an army to invade you (or anyone else?)
Personally I don't see long term national security as possible with nukes either. Sooner or later a situation will exist where a bad actor is in power. Or they are just launched by accident. And large countries are not guaranteed to be politically stable. These large nations can and do disintegrate.
I think the risk of obliteration without nukes is less bad. I would rather see my country destroyed in a first strike or invaded by a foreign power. I think that would be less bad than a nuclear war.
The funny things is that the USA could easily be defended from conventional attack. And a small sub based detterant would be good enough. And there is a risk in stoking paranoia in your enemy by having large stockpiles. The vast majority of nations have far less conventional defence than the US and still don't want nukes.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/america-needs-a-dead-hand/
Had the Soviet Union had such a system in place in September, 1983, human civilization would not be around for us to be having this discussion.
If the situation is so dire as to call for serious discussions about AI control of nuclear weapons, it is dire enough for us to initiate, sponsor, and encourage global discussion over massive multi-lateral nuclear weapons reduction.
https://www.jqpublicblog.com/navy-officer-director-of-usaf-s...
What’s next, simulated casualties are exchanged for actual casualties? I think one star trek series had a plot reaching that logical conclusion.
True - but if you add the words "nearly" and "allegedly", then it's not such a rosy picture.
The book "Red Star Rogue" proposes the idea that the Soviet submarine K-129 was commandeered and attempted to launch a first strike on the United States in 1968. She was very far off her expected course when sunk, and allegedly there was a fail-safe system that scuttled the boat when an unauthorized attempt was made to launch her missiles.[1]
The US's nuclear weapons were capable of being used by a single individual for quite some time, until the 1960s. Even with the advent of the Permissive Action Link, until 1977 the 8-digit arming code was - seriously - "00000000". They were worried they wouldn't have the code available if the weapons were needed.[2]
There are numerous "close calls" that occurred, but those two came to mind right away in the context of human beings causing or having nearly caused a nuclear attack by disobeying orders in particular.
1: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/red-star-rogue 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Develop...
[1]https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/america-needs-a-dead-hand/
To best avert disaster tech needs to first be open to the public and submisiable to regulation.
Yes 100% agreed.
> To best avert disaster tech needs to first be open to the public and submisiable to regulation.
But we know that's never gonna happen with defence tech so...
In the UK, due to the lack of land-mass to absorb a strike, the PM issues final orders to the commanders of the Trident subs. This is part of the deterrence strategy.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
It looks like PM May wrote her Letters of Last Resort, and then Johnson did the same. But from the looks of it, new Letters of Last Resort could be written pretty soon. Just thinking of those sub commanders, receiving new letters last week and then getting another set of letters just a couple of weeks later.
And in particular why they choose to propagate falsehoods like "Hypersonic cruise missiles are powered all the way to their targets using an advanced propulsion system called a SCRAMJET. These are very, very, fast. You may have six minutes from the time it’s launched until the time it strikes." Lest it be any confusion, scramjets are fast, but are nowhere as fast as ICBM's (Mach 5-10 vs Mach 20-23).
I was curious, so I looked it up. There are about 3,300 colonels in the US Air Force:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/239365/total-military-pe...
> Lest it be any confusion, scramjets are fast, but are nowhere as fast as ICBM's
I agree that's weird phrasing and incorrect on its face. That said - as I understand it, cruise missiles don't have the launch signature ICBMs have. While it would take longer for a cruise missile to travel the same distance as an ICBM, it might in fact give the target country less time to react if they aren't detected until they are well on their way.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/colossus_the_forbin_project
Funny trivia: there are parts of that movie shot in Rome, my city; you can see the Vatican, San Peters, the Orange Garden, the Janiculum and Isola Tiberina, specifically the hospital "Fate bene fratelli", where I was born.
The Americans meet there with Russians, joining forces to stop Colossus, and you can see written on a wall a mirrored "W Lenin".
The writing was actually there before they shot the movie, it was not added on purpose and stayed there until not long ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Russian+officer+prevented+wwiii&t=...
It would shift it to a hackable spoofable system. Said bad actor could state a "technically I didn't kill millions/billions you did" and be right in a way.
Developer/ Researcher: Hold down boy, we can do that.
Me: Can you create with a goodness in mind?
Developer/ Researcher: Oh yeah, we can train it speaking to a good mind.
Me: Wrong!. you gotta ask whats a good mind first!. Define it, you will stand corrected and you will realise whole concept of tech is absurd.
However what ultimately fixed this issue in the 60s was the adoption of nuclear submarines - you can surprise the adversary, but because you cannot find the subs the retaliatory strikes are assured.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/kille...
AI controlled weapons... Holy shit... Stupid ideas like that makes contemplate moving to the middle of the Pantanal or Amazon jungle to live of the land, away from all this madness.
EDIT: Well sue me for footnoting a cultural reference, I guess.
> as if some software is actually intelligent comparable to humans
How's your Go game coming along over there? (Have you ever even played? Because if you had I think you'd have more respect for the intelligence required (for a human) to succeed even moderately at the game.)
> not because something like Hal or the terminator will be created
Actually it is pretty dangerous for those reasons too.
Anyway, if you're worried about terminator and Hal like beings, it's futile to discuss intelligence when you are living in a science fiction world. In our world, those things do not exist and there is no sign that they will exist anytime soon. What does exist and is scary is bug ridden software that controls weapons. That doesn't make for great science fiction though.
Personally, I'm not hung up on whether or not submarines can swim. If you are, please give me your clear definition of intelligence and explain how Go and chess and "any other game" are excluded by it.
"The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
Nobody is suggesting submarines can think. The actual point that Dijkstra was making is that it matters what the machine is capable of, but it doesn't matter what we call the thing that it does.
If your private definition of intelligence doesn't allow you to apply it to machines, that's irrelevant.
> Unlike the game of Go, which the current world champion is a supercomputer, Alpha Go Zero, that learned through an iterative process, in nuclear conflict there is no iterative learning process.
Software engineers: ... Politicians: AI all the things
Step 2 .. End civilisation.
My money is on squid... and that they'll be no better than us.