Why The Pentagon’s ‘killer robots’ are spurring major concerns
thehill.com
thehill.com
E.g. a hundred years ago you could only convert cash into violence by recruiting and paying ordinary people. You couldn't wage a war that the people didn't want because people wouldn't sign up. Fifty years ago you could convert cash into indiscriminate violence with bombing campaigns, but you still needed the people if you wanted to invade instead of just destroying.
Killer robots shake that up, and I fear brings us one step closer to the apocalyptic "corporation-nations" of scifi. I don't think it's likely at this juncture, but corporations sitting on cash could wage war on each other or other nations. Chiquita doesn't need the CIA to do their dirty work, they can just invade Nicaragua with an army of autonomous robots.
Wealth is now directly translatable into force, which is somewhat terrifying.
This has existed for years in the form of "foreign legions". Arguably French foreign policy in Africa would have been quite different without the FFL.
> Fifty years ago you could convert cash into indiscriminate violence with bombing campaigns, you still needed the people if you wanted to invade instead of just destroying
None of these developments in "intelligent" weapons has moved beyond the "destroy" category. You still need boots on the ground to have any hope of building personal relationships in counterinsurgency and "nationbuilding".
> corporations sitting on cash could wage war on each other or other nations
We have already seen non-state entities wage "war" on other countries. It hasn't changed the fundamentals of international relations. Either (a) the "host" country condones the actions, at which point the actions are an act of war against the victim, or (b) the "host" cooperates in taking action against the non-state actor, or (c) the "host" is so weak that the non-state entity is the de facto "state". I don't see a realistic case where this behavior spreads beyond the very weak "states" in which it has already happened - functional states will not surrender their sovereignty to companies.
Another interesting corollary is whether EMP/jamming devices will be considered arms under the 2nd amendment if autonomous robots become common on the battlefield.
So long as religion plays a fundamental part of political rallying, I can’t see enough people following the logic that AI deserves rights too.
To be honest, as someone who isn’t religious myself and who does believe our consciousness is mechanical, I’m also yet to be persuaded that AI is even remotely sophisticated enough for right. And I don’t think we will see AGI in my lifetime either.
Portable jammers exist today, but are very short ranged. And obviously those aren't effective against autonomous systems.
Consider the following cases, and whether or not they are a "killer robot":
1. An automated shipboard air defence system, such as that provided by the Phalanx or SeaRAM, which can automatically detect and engage targets it determines pose a threat to the vesset (potentially faster than its human operators could respond).
2. An anti-ship missile, such as NSM, fitted with imaging infrared guidance so that it can autonomously identify hostile ships and prioritize which (and where) to strike.
3. An anti-radiation missile, such as HARM, which can be launched without a specific target and instead automatically identifies threat emitters to engage.
All of these have some aspect of "killer robot" behavior, and they are all currently in service (several for decades). These existing weapons systems are too critical for anyone to remotely consider regulation or prohibition that would reduce their effectiveness, so any realistic hypothetical "killer robot" definition needs to coexist with them.
I agree with your premise. A lot of our weapons already are killer robots, they just don't walk on two or four legs.
We see that $1000 drones with explosives can be incredibly effective at both surveillance and taking out squads. The fact that these $1000 drones are doing the work often reserved for missiles or artillery with a much higher price tag says just how efficient they are.
Its like the kamakazi pilots, except there's a human driving it, without a human inside.
Ukraine has shown what the future of warfare is. Now everyone is trying to be more efficient at it.
It's a race to give ever more autonomy and power to machines, because humans are too slow, too stupid, and too limited.
There are a million dystopian scifi novels about this, and it seems they're about to start coming true.
That's the point. We don't need amazing robot warriors, that's the dystopian scifi, the hero human who is that much better. Yeah that's gonna be the case, but the point is it doesn't matter. I can mass manufacture my losses faster than you can breed and train human replacements.
The biggest win with AI is that no matter how shitty it is, you can teach another one the same knowledge as the previous one instantly.
Applying controls to software and embedded hardware is a bit more difficult. Then you have things like precision GPS systems that might just be too useful for civilian uses to not allow free access to. It feels like pandoras box might already have been opened on this one without some backpedalling in certain areas.
And there is pressure to make them more and more autonomous because humans in the loop are too slow.
It doesn't seem like a safe direction.
I know that governments can be generally terrible and a world government is a lot of people's worst nightmare. But the alternative might be SkyNet. Or WWIII and then SkyNet.
The "Stop Killer Robots" campaign: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
Asking your nation to support the upcoming UN General Assembly resolution against autonomous weapons: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/news/unga-resolution-on-aut...
And having personal conversations with your friends in technology and defense industries who may contribute to these technologies.
Also, it's incredibly naive to think that you'd achieve anything but handicapping western nation in their development of autonomous weapons. China certainly isn't going to forego the technology out of moral squeamishness.
This kind of self-sabotaging suicidal stupidity should not exist after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia, China, and Iran already have "killer robots".
The only countries that will follow these suicidal regulations are stupid naive Western countries.
There's a lot of push back to deploying human soldiers in a conflict, but much less so for remotely controlled drones. It's likely that AI bots would have even less domestic pressure to avoid conflicts.
Autonomous and remotely controlled weapons systems have been in widespread use since at least the 1970s. There is zero chance that powerful countries would ever agree to ban them, or that such a ban could every be enforceable. It's a total fantasy.
Ridiculous. If the Cold War taught us anything, it's that peace is bought with the power to annihilate anyone who chooses to break it. And to extend the Cold War analogy, sovereignty is only real to the countries with the military prowess to uphold it. A peaceful world is one where war is too risky for the decision makers, not the soldiers.
My point is that drones and autonomous weapons make it less risky for decision makers to engage in war, hence making it less peaceful.
We will have to depend on the morality of the masses and hope that most wont build their own killer drones in their garages.