I realize that's not a great argument and was definitely tongue-in-cheek, but given there's still a lot of debate about the accuracy of AI for far more mundane tasks, my personal perspective is that until we have LLMs and such that are truly, demonstrably far more accurate than humans, with true reasoning and judgement capabilities, they don't belong where lives are at stake.
I wouldn't want an LLM-underpinned machine running anesthesia during a surgery; why would I want an LLM-underpinned military apparatus that is deciding the lives of far more? I wouldn't, not in their current state.
In a hypothetical future where we truly trust incredibly smart AIs or LLMs or whatever "smart" technology it is for driving weaponry, okay - if it's truly necessary; I abhor war and the death and destruction wrought by it.
In my mind, though - even if we get to that future where there's some vastly superior technology to the LLMs we have today, which can judge and reason, then I'll have a bunch of other questions, like understanding the motivations of said technology, because I suspect it'll be something much closer to AGI, and that opens a whole separate can of philosophical worms.
> "You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"
Most likely this event happened due to a bad targeting system that wasn't smart enough, if it had a better llm underpinning it (assuming it had any) maybe those lives would have been saved. More reason for more smart people like the author to work on these systems.
"We say: 'Mohammad something is there with shovels.'"
"We have cameras that can read the badge of the person. 'Mohammed Something.'"
"WE'RE WATCHING. If anybody goes there, THEY GET BLOWN UP."
"Eventually, we'll take it."
They have also admitted they saw the children’s flower chalk drawings too. And they double tapped.
Um, yes? It's bad enough humans are murdering each other. At least a human can in theory be held accountable for pulling the trigger. The last thing we need is an unaccountable ralph loop reasoning about which schools and churches to bomb every time it wakes up.
> if it had a better llm underpinning it
Ah yes, the "LLMs are intelligent, you're just not using the newest fanciest model" fallacy. This time with innocent lives on the line. If only we used ChatGPT-8.9 instead of 8.8, those poor kids would still be alive today.
When the decision to kill another human being is made that should be in the hands of a directly accountable other human being, not an unaccountable machine developed in the basement of a private corporation.
And mines, both dumb and smart, in particular anti-personell mines are banned by the Ottawa treaty ratified by 162 countries. It's exactly the autonomous and fundamentally uncontrollable nature of mines, not just that they're dumb, that has produced countless of casualties long after wars were over. Can you tell me that millions of autonomous loitering munitions are not going to end up exactly like those mines still blowing legs off people decades after conflicts are over? And who is responsible then?
And when those inevitably backfire and start blowing innocent people up, are the CEOs going to prison, the politicians who ordered their production originally? No, nobody is going to claim they're responsible, and that's why it's insane to build a weapon that does not have a name, time, place and direct order associated with it.
Even the US military is already incapable of taking responsibility of blowing a school with 150 kids up. You want to hand these people systems that are unaccountable by definition, that are smarter than they are, when they already struggle to understand the consequences of their own decisions?
I also want people to be held accountable when they do unjustified killings. AI weapons make it FAR too easy to simply pass off a killing as a "woopsie doodle." It's just not acceptable to say "The algorithm made a mistake, version 23 will do better".
I don't have a problem with the AI providing additional information to it's user, but when that's incorporated into a weapon it's a short distance from that to completely automating the killing.
That's why I'm completely against AI weapons.
Being fully autonomous makes it hard to identify exactly who that user is and is easy to dilute responsibility. Perhaps someone was added to a kill list by mistake. Maybe some internet hi-jinks tricked an AI into falsely identifying someone as a kill target. Perhaps it's the case that someone was in the 5% of a 95% confidence of identification. I'm not a fan of putting killing into the hands of something known to get things wrong 1 in 20 (95%), or 1 in 100 (99%), or 1 in 1000 (99.9%).
> but if the weapons are more advanced and safer then why is that bad?
It's yet to be proven that they are "safer" as they become more advanced. There's also a question of "safer to who". It's technically "safer" for a soldier to shoot first and ask questions later, it's obviously not safer for the villagers.
False identification, which is an absolute part of AI, doesn't make these weapons safer for anyone.
> I like that autonomous vehicles like Waymo are 10x safer then human drivers, even if a 'Machine' is making decisions.
Waymo has the reverse bias. If anyone dies as a result of waymo it's gone horribly wrong.
AI weapons are designed exactly to kill, if they don't kill when they should something has gone wrong.
Historically, the folks doing the murdering just don't care about the folks they kill, so "safer for the killers" isn't a win for most of us.
"More precision" isn't about killing less folks, it's about making it safer and easier for folks who kill folks to do that work.
So those of us who dislike killing don't like these tools because we consider them to be immoral.
Because the minute you defer decision making to a machine you eliminate human accountability.
Any time the robot is used to do something illegal or immoral, you can just say "it was a bug" or "that's not what I really meant". It enables plausible deniability.
We see this every time AI is allowed to make decisions. That robot promoted violent extremism in your feed? It misidentified a black man? It disproportionately chose men in hiring decisions? shrug Its the algorithm. Who can argue with the algorithm?
Likewise any attempt to codify liability is typically avoided at all costs because the purpose of those systems is what they do.
Right now there's a lot of killing that's only limited by the risk of collateral damage.
Flipped around, the best deterrent against major wars is mutually assured destruction.
Has this been proven to actually occur? There have been lots of reports that similar systems in Israel that use AI, struck hundreds of targets that were civilian. They did not discriminate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
Teaching something or someone to pull a trigger is trivial compared to teaching them not to. I have no reason to believe that automated weapons and surveillance will be more reliable than our world leaders or that the world will be safer with them in it.
Yes. If smart mines lead to belligerents laying more of them because they're "safer."
Technology changes this by reducing the human involvement needed in killing. The Nazi gas chambers were a historical example — it turned out mowing down innocent civilians with machine guns was too mentally taxing for even devoted Nazis, so they invented a bloodless industrialized process where they can kill with greater efficiency while also sheltering the killer from the immediate effects of his actions. A win win for the Nazis, not so much for its victims.
Autonomous weapons are dangerous for this exact reason. They bypass individual moral decisions entirely. They are the perfect "just following orders" machine. They allow a small concentration of powerful people to impose force upon the populace without ever having to fear their own soldiers. It tips the balance of power massively in favor of those already powerful.