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Comment by drawnwren | Hacker News Reader

This comment appears to be getting upvotes, so I am going to jump in and say that it is very clear to anyone who knows that this commenter has no idea how AI is being used in the military or how military targeting works in the West.

These things are generally classified, but algorithms are nowhere close to being considered decision-capable and human-in-the-loop targeting will be the norm for quite some time.

Even next generation systems that are being considered are still human queued and the AI comes in during the engagement step.

If you look at the stages of the F3EA cycle (Find, Fix, Finish, Analyze) there is no single step which is currently offloaded to an algorithm.

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Well, then I am going to jump in to say that insiders who jump in to assure us that due to their classified insider knowledge they can reassure us it's not like that at all... you realize this doesn't work, right? Not on anyone who doesn't already believe it. Even if you were right, you're simply not trustworthy.

There are two things I wish I could make you and your friends understand: one is how deep you've dug that credibility hole. There was a price to pay for all that secrecy.

The other is, when you're out here trying to manage the non-classified public's perceptions, why on earth would you trust that your bosses aren't managing yours? Why would you think you get to know what the long term plans are?

Ehh, I don’t work there anymore. Just got nerd sniped by someone being obviously wrong on the internet.

> one is how deep you've dug that credibility hole. There was a price to pay for all that secrecy.

It’s a weird thing that the public thinks the defense sector doesn’t know this. They’re aware. I could try and reason with you on the internet, but this isn’t a place for changing people’s opinions.

I would instead tell you that people who work in defense tech tend to be motivated by morals and any argument that what they’re doing is dangerous is an implicit argument that they’re intelligent (otherwise, it wouldn’t seem too dangerous).

So, given those two facts — you can probably do a better job of reasoning about their motives than this.

> The other is, when you're out here trying to manage the non-classified public's perceptions, why on earth would you trust that your bosses aren't managing yours? Why would you think you get to know what the long term plans are?

Just bored on HN on a Monday. Same as anyone. Obviously not working on classified stuff, or I wouldn’t have access to HN.

Just because things are secret from the public doesn’t mean the defense industry is some cloak and dagger affair. It’s painfully boring bureaucracy. Decisions happen on the order of weeks to years, across many meetings. Everyone in the room knows the long term plans.

> It’s a weird thing that the public thinks the defense sector doesn’t know this. They’re aware.

Their actions aren't consistent with being aware. Your post wasn't consistent with being aware. They think they understand, but they act in exactly the way they should not act, digging the hole of distrust deeper.

Look at Keith Alexander going to work for Mohammed bin Salman and Saud al-Qahtani. Is that consistent with being "motivated by morals"? Do you think everyone working under him understood that such were his personal long-term plans?

There are two problems with your argument. You’re trying to reason from a specific case to the general and your specific case isn’t even that great.

Keith Alexander retired from active duty 10 years ago. He’s now, currently, on the Amazon board of directors. Does this make every Amazon employee culpable for his actions?

Generally speaking, yes, it is not uncommon for leadership to contract with Saudi Arabia. I did not and continue to not offer any opinion about this nonsequitur. I do not think it’s at all common for them to share secrets. Further, I have no idea what this has to do with the morality of secrets as whole.

I gave an example, I did not "reason from a specific case".

The point is not that your organization gets "tainted" by Alexander's actions. You must answer for your own sins, whoever your leader is.

The point is that he was always that sort of person, and that's the sort of people who become your leaders. Yes, it's a problem that completely amoral people get high positions in business too, but Amazon board members are not quite as powerful as NSA chiefs - among other things, because Amazon is not as good at convincing its workers to identify with it, like you identify with your mil-int employers.

>people who work in defense tech tend to be motivated by morals

Joke of the year

Not to Ukrainians

It is to the Iraqis/Afghans/etc

Sure, gp implied morality was absurd. I didn’t say it was always correct, only that it’s possible to be intelligent and motivated by some set of morals.

I don’t think most of this stuff is a secret… I watched one of the recent documentaries about the frantic exit of Afghanistan and its effect on the Afghan military. There were scenes where the military used drones on various targets, one dude made the decision at the end.

Where is the human in the loop for typical mine deployments? We already have autonomous killing machines, it's just that they are not very sophisticated, often having trouble to tell children from tanks.

I'd expect that mine manufacturers jump on the A.I. bandwagon to suggest that weapons are designed to be less harmful to civilians, and should not be subject to bans on certain types of mines.

The US already uses self-deactivating mines when deployed (after a couple days or months they go inert on their own). The trouble is like any system the mechanism can fail to deactivate (1 in 100 was an estimate I remember from 10 years ago).

"SKYNET is a program by the U.S. National Security Agency that performs machine learning analysis on communications data to extract information about possible terror suspects. The tool is used to identify targets, such as al-Qaeda couriers, who move between GSM cellular networks. Specifically, mobile usage patterns such as swapping SIM cards within phones that have the same ESN, MEID or IMEI number are deemed indicative of covert activities.[1][2] Like many other security programs, the SKYNET program uses graphs that consist of a set of nodes and edges to visually represent social networks.[3] The tool also uses classification techniques like random forest analysis. Because the data set includes a very large proportion of true negatives and a small training set, there is a risk of overfitting.[1] Bruce Schneier argues that a false positive rate of 0.008% would be low for commercial applications where "if Google makes a mistake, people see an ad for a car they don't want to buy" but "if the government makes a mistake, they kill innocents."[1]

The SKYNET project was linked with drone systems, thus creating the potential for false-positives to lead to deaths.[1][5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)

I generally agree but there are munitions that are capable of fully automated no human in the loop target selection, like LRASM, CAPTOR, or Brimstone. The military is very conservative about this stuff, as they're the last people that want a rogue weapon, but there is a clear trend towards increasing these capabilities because of EW systems denying the ability to have a human in the loop.

Humans are going to be taken out of the loop at some point if for no other reason than being too slow.

Already happened with the Aegis Combat System. Humans are too slow for combat with supersonic missiles. Operators can put it into a fully automated mode and it will detect, classify, prioritize, and engage targets with no human in the loop. This all uses regular deterministic logic and doesn't rely on what we would usually call "AI".

I don't know the first thing about autonomous weapons systems, but nothing the GP said sounds technically infeasible. And what does the game theory look like once one party has AI that can make decisions without humans? Wouldn't that be a huge "advantage" in combat?

The military has practically zero accountability to the public. "National security" gets suits dismissed.

Decision-capable is entirely subjective, and thus imperfectly controlled by bureaucracy.

You don't know for sure no one is already doing this.

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