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I guess what I'm really asking is whether or not it's moral and ethical to use AI that targets autonomously? My understanding is that it's being used that way, but I can't back that up and I'll take your word for it if that's not the case. But it is certainly a plausible scenario. Everyone invested in AI seems determined to put it in everything because they need consumers to want to pay for it, and right now they haven't figured out a way to earn back from consumers the over a trillion dollars that has been put into the AI bubble. I don't have much faith that the people with billions invested don't want return on their investment, and I don't think they care about the consequences necessary to get it back.

edit for clarity

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> moral and ethical to use AI that targets autonomously?

First point, vision systems have been used in industry to look for misaligned labels, incorrectly folded papers (in high speed paper presses), wrong items on high speed conveyor belts etc. for thirty odd years now - they have issues that a very distinct from LLM 'AI' hallucinations.

That's nomenclature out the way.

Landmines are indiscriminate, they trigger on any weight or pressure over a threshold.

A vision based Felixer, by contrast, only triggers on cats (well, almost always only) and leaves bilbies and bettongs to walk on by.

That's an improvement over landmines.

The crux of your issue here might be the morality and ethics of establishing human exclusion zones within which all humans are highly likely to die.

These historically are created with rapid patterned artillery fire, butterfly mines, Napalm, indiscriminate criss crossing machine gun fire, etc.

Now there exists an option to use drones to kill all humans and leave the horses and cows alive.

Is it your concern that a bad vision threshold might kill a horse rather than a person? (Likely not)

Would you prefer an area to be napalm'd and agent orange'd back to dust?

War is hell.

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/feral-cat-management-...

I'd prefer a world without war, rather than one that is starting to make the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day a reality.

Also, why do people keep talking about landmines? I'm talking about software, you are talking about dumb mechanical things from WWII. This isn't a philosophical question about methods of warfare from the past, but the software that controls the dumb hardware.

> why do people keep talking about landmines?

I, a person, singular, mention landmines as they are a hardware device that are designed to trigger action on a threshold.

Felixers are computer vision based devices that are designed to trigger action on a threshold.

These are actual real world objects that Bishop Berkeley can kick, not vague philosophical questions but actual engineered devices that kill and are in use today.

Land mines are still very much in widespread use

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