The military is building long-range facial recognition that works in the dark
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
If China’s facial recognition system is currently “too far”, how is this tech not also already too far? I guess if a technology is only used to recognize and assassinate foreign nationals, and not surveil citizens (which it will eventually be used to do), most Americans are okay with it. Some commenters are critical of this research, but the level of concern in these comments is way less than on posts about similar Chinese systems.
The point isn’t that this tech could increase accuracy and kill somewhat fewer civilians compared to the current amount of civilians killed regularly by U.S. drone and air attacks around the world. The entire basis for this activity - shooting missiles into civilian areas thousands of miles from home in endless wars - is the issue. The fact that the military sees a use for this kind of technology is the core of the problem, and no matter how well it works, it will only increase the efficiency of assassinations performed by the U.S. military, not abolish them.
It also opens up the possibility of weaponry optimized for an individual target's physical and mental weaknesses, personalized propaganda, and attacks on people's social connections, including noncombatants.
You could frame this as the government making it possible to kill people in the dark automatically or as another data input to a vast array of data sources used to make life/death decisions for high-value military targets.
The technology has the potential to make sure we're getting the right people but almost certainly its use will be pushed too far. It has a utility and we should rightly be concerned that it doesn't get used outside of its limited intended application.
Yes, I know, you'd prefer that they stop killing people. To do that, you have to either 1) persuade a large number of people to stop trying to kill Americans, 2) persuade America to get out of the Middle East and just let things happen over there however they're going to happen, or 3) persuade the powers that be that, even if we stay in the Middle East, killing people that want to kill us is not the most effective route to peace.
And those are fine goals. But until you achieve one of those three, it isn't amiss that, when we're trying to kill someone, we do the best we can to actually kill one of the people that's trying to kill some of us, and not some random other person.
But, for what I was trying to say on this topic, Jevon's paradox works, too.
I'd also posit that expanding the US surveillance capabilities now to better the current situation might also lead to a worse future if we manage to fix the underlying problems you numbered.
The dilemma they present you with is perfectly designed for engineer minds (like me and you) who love to solve problems, increase efficiency, and feel moral about it. In short, it's a trap to get us talking about the wrong things, stuck in details.
This is the gradient that pushes us towards dystopia. They feed us fear and lies, take preemptive steps, and we get stuck arguing technicalities, legalities, and tuning up the war machine.
So, in short, I fully reject this framing and urge you to do the same.
If you look at the developments to the hellfire missile: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31409/everything-we-kn... . You can see that it's now more accurate and less likely to cause collateral damage.
The problem with the technology is that the more automated it gets, the more tempting and easy it is to use this technology liberally and frequently. I'm not against the inherent development of the technology. Only its application.
Technology is enabling these operations.
The technology I worry about most is the hypersonic missiles.
If you look at the US "leadership", surely anyone who is reading HN still has enough mental capacity to worry about that kind of judicial power.
Also this bit from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...: "Between 2009 and 2015, out of 473 strikes between 64–116 non-combatant deaths occurred. However during that period, the Obama Administration did count all military-age males in strike zones as combatants unless explicit intelligence exonerated them posthumously."
I don't think I trust the US military to determine what a "high-value target" is based on their track record. I also don't think more data will help, since the one of the basic steps for understanding data is to understand how limited and/or detailed the dataset you are working with actually is. If they haven't clearly understood the dataset they are working with now, there is basically no chance that more data will help. There needs to be a culture shift, not just a refinement.
If drone strikes replace ground troops, they're an absolute godsend. If they supplement them, it's another tragedy. I'd love to live in a world where no one is killed and these sorts of body calculations aren't necessary but it's pretty clear we choose not to live in that world. As a result, technology can either be a tool to reduce violence by making it more precise and targeted or it can automate violence and make it cheap.
International wars are generally fought to either gain territory (which is only valuable if it's livable and people tend to live where it's livable) or resources (and people tend to live near or work near where there are resources). How would a robotic army not still lead to civilian casualties in this scenario? Wouldn't that just make it cheap (in the public opinion sense) for a larger economy to fight senseless wars?
Besides that, think about how civil wars would be impacted. Think about how the recent genocides in darfur or kosovo would play out if they had access to current information tech and drones.
I hope wars stay extremely expensive, both in the monetary sense and in the public opinion sense, of which one component is that the ones risking their lives are actually the citizens.
Why fight a whole war when you can just kill the generals?
If we want to think about war from an economic perspective, it doesn't make sense to kill civilians. Civilians are valuable. Murdering the labor force you seek to extract rent from is usually a bad decision. Civilians probably don't care as much about the political situation as their personal situation. It also just complicates things.
It's possible that technology pushes war in this direction but it could also go in the direction you hint at. A country may be able to conduct an asymmetric war where their soldiers/civilians face 0 risk and the other side faces all of the risk. A country may also use this technology to control its own civilians.
I think it's an active choice and if we don't push in the better realistic direction the other path will be taken.
"Fail early, kill innocents often" is a terrible paradigm.
Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Firstly, it's about time we stop pretending that people wait until technology does something better than humans do before they deploy it. It will be deployed long before that point. Secondly, there are more reasons to be concerned about this sort of technology than just whether it is effective at its intended purpose (identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination).
I think we need to stop pretending that humans are perfect, or even acceptably good.
Computers get better as time goes off. This technology wasn't a thing ten years ago. Now it's questionable. In ten years it'll be better than it was today. Humans will be exactly as good in ten years as they were today and exactly as good as they were a hundred years ago. And what they are today is not good enough.
> identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination
I think we need to stop pretending that humans are paragons of virtue. They do things we should be concerned about even when they can't execute effectively.
Long-range identification and assassination of people who don't want to be found is a capability that already exists, and in fact has existed for centuries - for a given value of "exists". Sniper teams, helicopter gunships, and artillery spotters have precisely this role and they make mistakes and kill the wrong people all the damn time.
And on top of that... when was the last time you heard about some US soldiers committing war crimes, in person, with their bare hands? No technology involved at all. No technology needed. Stop blaming it for human failings.
Okay. Automated call systems have been deployed for decades now and continue to increase their market penetration. They are still not nearly as useful or good at what they do as a human would be, but that did not make any significant difference to the speed and rate at which they were deployed. Your argument is that abstractly, at some point, they should be better than humans. Maybe so, but that's not what I was arguing--I was arguing that the conditions for a technology's deployment are only distantly correlated with how good they are in comparison to humans performing the same task, not making some philosophical point about how the machines will not replace us or whatever.
> And on top of that... when was the last time you heard about some US soldiers committing war crimes, in person, with their bare hands? No technology involved at all. No technology needed. Stop blaming it for human failings.
I'm not really going to bother to respond in depth to the rest of the stuff you said since it seems to be responding to points I did not make (when did I ever say people were paragons of virtuous, hadn't killed people before, didn't make mistakes, or didn't use technology to kill people?). I am merely pointing out that technology is not value neutral; the particular technology we are talking about is explicitly designed to do pretty awful things. Responding that the real problem is people is missing the point; it's another iteration of the "guns don't kill people" argument.
Does it matter if the technology makes the precision a bit better and the individual person evaluated for being killed, has a little better chance of surviving, thanks to being identified by a machine?
When... the machines allow many more people being killed. After all, this is what automation allows us to do. How many qualified and highly trained snipers could the military deploy? Not very many, compared to how many drones and other augmented systems they can deploy now and in the future.
Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these.
We already do that. It's just that the computers are squishy, unverifiable, black-boxed wetware that tend to commit war crimes, and the actuators are twitchy pieces of crap that are so bad at shooting that they have to be equipped with machine guns. What do you think soldiers are doing when they get shot at or blown up by insurgents or accidentally shoot reporters or civilians? They're not sitting in their base playing cards, that's for sure.
100 thousand automatic machines with 5% failure will kill many, many more. Possibly forever, because there will be no need "take our troops home". The troops are already at home, pressing kill/live in their drone baracks.
Imagine if one of the superpowers one of these days would develop the technology to smoke anyone they wanted anywhere on the surface of the planet with 100% accuracy. Do you believe that would lead to more or less deaths? Do you believe this would lead to unchecked use of that power?
Personally I'm not too optimistic.
The only mention which comes close:
> “Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,”
"Fusion" is military parlance for "we would use a variety of sensor inputs and systems" to make inferences. So, this would likely be only one component of many others used to determine identity and/or hostile intent.
I'm sure there's a reluctance to put out the real capabilities directly, but I'm also sure there's a reluctance to put out the real weaknesses directly.
Isn't this what you want? A system that could be fooled by a little facial hair seems like it would be pretty useless.
Reminds me of Captain America: Winter soldier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ru5wM7fl7g
"Deploy the algorithm. Algorithm deployed"
Look N° 1 could fit very well in a military context I believe. Look + 3 however required at least some urban setting.
Also not sure if some of this measures would work with thermal imagery.
Individually you could do this with bright IR emitting LEDs. On the scale of the battlefield, a cool trick that is already being done today on yachts of the rich and private is using a laser to shine a lot of light directly on the CMOS (sensor element) of the capturing device when the shutter opens.
These methods work but they don’t hide what they’re doing (jamming). It would be instantly obvious as to what you were doing which would be OK on the battlefield if you’re not trying to hide your position, not so much in China.
Not a future I want to be in.
The strategy is a dragon seed. Every collateral drone strike breeds resentment for generations. The chickens will come home to roost. (But then the MIC can sell even more weapons, so I guess everything will be fine.)
Currently the drone operators experience PTSD from loitering over targets for hours, but with increased automation, maybe someone won’t even have to look at the images. Just “authenticate” a strike based on weighed parameters. War can be made much more streamlined yet.
I rather believe other factors are at play and we have peaceful times despite drone strikes.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d738aq/us-drones-target-t...
Corollary: not until widespread use and abuse highlights the danger.