Ha. I know of a device with a very simple AI program that can tell if an enemy is standing on it. If so, the enemy is killed. It’s called a mine. They have been used in every land (and naval) war since they were invented.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25235/the-u-s-is-getti...
You don’t have a case of no human in the loop until that mine is capable of exploding or not exploding and it’s responsible on a case by case basis for deciding which to do.
United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, India, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Vietnam,North Korea, South Korea, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, F.S. Micronesia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar,Nepal, Syria, Tonga, Uzbekistan.
Those countries together represent a significant portion of the global population!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Ottaw...
So really what the OP means is the ethics of what to kill and what to let live should not be left to an AI.
It’s a good point.
The level of complexity is arbitrary. Maybe the AI won't blow something up unless it has a heat signature. Maybe it has to detect a pulse. Maybe it won't blow up something that emits a certain beacon. Maybe the kill has to be within a certain timeframe. Maybe the target had to have a certain mass. Which of these considerations qualifies as AI?
From a different perspective you might think of guns and bombs as having similar problems—a human might decide to pull the trigger, but the human involved has limited control over who is killed and what is destroyed.
I think this has to be a pretty classic example of the way discourse can get derailed on HN, Stack Overflow, or the like—Alice has an interesting point to make, but Bob takes the floor to point out that Alice used a word incorrectly, even though he knows what Alice meant.
The discussion about landmines is actually a good point—the legal language around landmines has evolved somewhat over the years and you might hear them referred to as “LAWs” these days, which stands for “Lethal Autonomous Weapons”. So many of the the same treaties will regulate both autonomous drones and landmines, with the same language.
Words and meanings are not equally important. Words are only there to communicate meaning. You can communicate meaning without words, and you can even communicate the correct meaning with incorrect words.
There's an interesting discussion to be had here, but "are landmines AI" isn't it.
And yet, landmines kill an estimated 15-20,000 civilians each year. About one in five are children. All because someone decided to defend an area. You say this is “working as intended”, but—how can this be the intended result?
Automatic weapon systems allow you to make decisions about who lives and dies, and they let you escape responsibility by making those deaths occur at a different time/place from when and where you caused those deaths. If you were defending an area with teammates and friends’ lives on the line, you might be a little less careful about how your decisions affect the lives of civilians—especially the civilian deaths are uncertain and distant.
I’d go back and check with product on the requirements for that one. Sounds like the opposite of what I’d want.
I think maybe those landmines are supposed to kill specific targets, and avoid collateral damage.
Or further still, doesn't the camouflaged trap, or non-attendance-required trap of any sort in general, become the original autonomous tool?