https://theconversation.com/killer-robots-are-becoming-a-real-threat-in-africa-233727
Africa’s Sahel region is engulfed by violence, and now there are fears that the conflict could take another bloody turn.
Whoever bans them will be at a disadvantage militarily. They will never be banned for this one reason alone.
I think you're conflating a ban to include banning their production (not an unreasonable assumption). As we've seen with nukes, however, possession of a banned weapon is sometimes as good as using it.
I'm guessing the major countries will ban them, but still develop the technology, let other countries start using it, then say "well everyone else is using it so now we have to as well". Just like we're seeing with mini drones in Ukraine. The US is officially against automated attacks, but we're supporting a country using them, and we're developing full automation for our own aircraft.
Whoever bans them will be at a disadvantage militarily.
...and exactly this way of thinking will one day create "Skynet".
We need to be (or become) smarter than that!
Otherwise mankind is doomed.
Unfortunately this is basic game theory, so the “smart” thing is to have the weapons, but avoid war.
Once we’ve grown past war, we can disarm, but it couldn’t happen in the opposite order.
Once we’ve grown past war,
But what until then? Your ideas do not provide any solutions. You just say that it is unavoidable as it is.
The process of collective disarming is the path towards growing past war. And that first step is the collective banning of manufacturing such weapons.
I disagree. War isn’t caused by weapons. It’s caused by racism, religious strife, economic hardship, natural resource exploitation, and more. Those need fixed before anyone will be willing to put away their weapons.
Life doesn't adhere to waterfall methodology: we don't have to do one first, and then the other. We can progressively disarm as we're addressing the problems you mentioned..
Fair enough, but there’s still far too much conflict to begin demilitarization at this point in time. What the world can mostly agree on is to limit itself to being destroyed 55 times over by nuclear weapons (by UN estimates). And that’s in a world where nobody has actually used nuclear weapons (offensively) in 90 years.
These kinds of things take so many generations because the fundamental conflict between humans is not resolved. If there had been no Cold War, maybe we would have totally denuclearized by now, but I still doubt it.
War isn’t caused by weapons.
It's enabled by weapons.
And there are people who want to use weapons when they exist, simply because they exist.
And there are people - for example weapons manufacturers - who want other people to use weapons.
Obviously it’s enabled by weapons. But that strengthens my point further - the nation who reduces their weapons first loses.
When has a nation completely set down their weapons, and what was the effect? One obvious case that comes to mind is Ukraine, who fully denuclearized. Ever since that moment they have repeatedly been invaded by Russia (the nation who maintained the weapons).
What you suggest is asking for this to repeat over and over again. The only truly viable path to eradicating war, is to first eradicate the problems that cause war, then to abolish weapons.
If you have factual evidence that your method works, please present it. I shared hard evidence of my perspective.
"Basic game theory" says we should destroy this wacko system. jfc.
TBH these kinds of sloppy arguments are a big part of why game theory is a joke. It's fine as math (apart from misleading terminology) but a major problem is applying it to situations that are definitely not "games".
For example killer robots are not a game in any mathematically meaningful sense. The situation has been to be maximally simplified into a game between two people in order to reduce the situation into a simplistic analogy. This is neither science nor math. It's no reason to condone killer robots.
Ban the state first. Every state. These wacko cultists are literally destroying the planet so they can control people with killer robots.
Yeah totally agree. The general population almost never wants to go to war - the plutocrats do.
Once we take care of our own corrupt governance I suspect wars will rapidly disappear, and then weapons will likewise disappear.
Once combat AI exceeds humans:
A ban to all war, globally. Those that violate the ban will have autonomous soldier deployed on their soil.
This is the only way it will work, no other path leads to a world without autonomous warbots. We can ban them all we want but there will be some terrorist cell with access to arduinos that can do the same in a garage. And China will never follow such a ban
I mean, most complex weapons systems have been some level of robot for quite a while. Aircraft are fly-by-wire, you have cruise missiles, CIWS systems operating in autonomous mode pick out targets, ships navigate, etc.
I don't expect that that genie will ever go back in the bottle. To do it, you'd need an arms control treaty, and there'd be a number of problems with that:
Verification is extremely difficult, especially with weapons that are optionally-autonomous. FCAS, for example, the fighter that several countries in Europe are working on, is optionally-manned. You can't physically tell by just looking at such aircraft whether it's going to be flown by a person or have an autonomous computer do so. If you think about the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan managed to build treaty-violating warships secretly. Warships are very large, hard to disguise, can be easily distinguished externally, and can only be built and stored in a very few locations. I have a hard time seeing how one would manage verification with autonomy.
It will very probably affect the balance of power. Generally-speaking, arms control treaties that alter the balance of power aren't going to work, because the party disadvantaged is not likely to agree to it.
I'd also add that I'm not especially concerned about autonomy specifically in weapons systems.
It sounds like your concern, based on your follow-up comment, is that something like Skynet might show up -- the computer network in the Terminator movie series that turn on humans. The kind of capability you're dealing with isn't on that level. I can imagine one day, general AI being an issue in that role -- though I'm not sure that it's the main concern I'd have, would guess that dependence and then an unexpected failure might be a larger issue. But in any event, I don't think that it has much to do with military issues -- I mean, in a scenario where you truly had an uncontrolled, more-intelligent-than-humans artificial intelligence running amok on something like the Internet, it isn't going to matter much whether-or-not you've plugged it into weapons, because anything that can realistically fight humanity can probably manage to get control of or produce weapons anyway. Like, this is an issue with the development of advanced artificial intelligence, but it's not really a weapons or military issue. If we succeed in building something more-intelligent than we are, then we will fundamentally face the problem of controlling it and making something smarter than us do what we want, which is kind of a complicated problem.
The term coined by Yudkowsky for this problem is "friendly AI":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence
Friendly artificial intelligence (also friendly AI or FAI) is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests or contribute to fostering the improvement of the human species. It is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence and is closely related to machine ethics. While machine ethics is concerned with how an artificially intelligent agent should behave, friendly artificial intelligence research is focused on how to practically bring about this behavior and ensuring it is adequately constrained.
It's not an easy problem, and I think that it's worth discussion. I just think that it's mostly unrelated to the matter of making weapons autonomous.
Reward models (aka reinforcement learning) and preference optimization models can come to some conclusions that we humans find very strange when they learn from patterns in the data they’re trained on. Especially when those incentives and preferences are evaluated (or generated) by other models. Some of these models could very well could come to the conclusion that nuking every advanced-tech human civilization is the optimal way to improve the human species because we have such rampant racism, classism, nationalism, and every other schism that perpetuates us treating each other as enemies to be destroyed and exploited.
Sure, we will build ethical guard rails. And we will proclaim to have human-in-the-loop decision agents, but we’re building towards autonomy and edge/corner-cases always exist in any framework you constrain a system to.
I’m an AI Engineer working in autonomous agentic systems—these are things we (as an industry) are talking about—but to be quite frank, there are not robust solutions to this yet. There may never be. Think about raising a teenager—one that is driven strictly by logic, probabilistic optimization, and outcome incentive optimization.
It’s a tough problem. The naive-trivial solution that’s also impossible is to simply halt and ban all AI development. Turing opened Pandora’s box before any of our time.
Yeah, it's not easy. I'm not sure that the problem is realistically solvable. On the other hand, the potential rewards for doing so are immeasurable -- at the extreme, you're basically creating and chaining a "god", which would be damned nice to have at one's beck and call. So it'd be damned nice to solve it.
The technical problems are hard, because we'd like to build a self-improving system, and build constraints that apply to it even after its complexity has grown far beyond our ability to understand it or even the ability of our tools to do so. It's like a bacterium trying to genetically-engineer something that will evolve into a human compelled to do what the bacterium wants.
However we constrain the system...maybe in the near term, we could recover from a flawed "containment" system. But in the long run, those constraints are probably going to have to permit for zero failures. You make yourself a god and it slips its leash, you may not get a second chance to leash it. Zero failures, ever, forever, hardware or software, is kind of an unimaginable bar for even the vastly more-simple systems that we build today.
Even if one can build a system to constrain something that we cannot understand, and works perfectly, forever, part of the problem is that when building computer systems, the engineer has to iron out corner cases that don't come up when requirements are specified in a rather-loose fashion, in everyday English. We have a hard time getting a sufficiently-complete specification for most of what software does today. The problems involved in ironing out the corner cases to write a sufficiently-complete specification of "what is in humanity's interest" when we often can't even agree on that ourselves seems rather difficult. That's not even a computer science issue and we've been banging on that one for all of human history and couldn't come up with an answer.
The above specification has to hold for all kinds of environments, including ones with technology that will not exist today. Like, take a kind of not-unreasonable-sounding utilitarian philosophical position -- "seek to maximize human happiness for the greatest number of people". Well...that's not even complete for today (what exactly constitutes "happiness"?), but in a world where an AI with a sufficient level of technological advancement could potentially both surgically modify a human to hardwire their pleasure sensations and also clone and mass-grow more human fetuses, that quite-reasonable-sounding rule suddenly starts to look rather less-reasonable.
I've wondered before whether artificial general intelligence might be the answer to the Fermi paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."
Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi's name is associated with the paradox because of a casual conversation in the summer of 1950 with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski. While walking to lunch, the men discussed recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The conversation moved on to other topics, until during lunch Fermi blurted out, "But where is everybody?" (although the exact quote is uncertain).
There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox, such as suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) humans see no evidence.
One such potential answer is rather dark:
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. The astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner stated that the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors—the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former potentially leads to complete destruction, while the latter may lead to biological or mental degeneration. Possible means of annihilation via major global issues, where global interconnectedness actually makes humanity more vulnerable than resilient, are many, including war, accidental environmental contamination or damage, the development of biotechnology, synthetic life like mirror life, resource depletion, climate change, or poorly-designed artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypothesizing.
In 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii speculated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.
The concerning thing is that if this is the answer, we have spaceflight now and so we probably aren't all that far from interstellar travel. We made it this far, so there's not a lot of time left for us to have our near-inevitable disaster. This should be a critical phase where we expect to have our disaster soon...yet we don't see a technology or anything likely to cause our certain or near-certain destruction.
Sagan thought that nuclear weapons might be the answer. It is a technology associated with interstellar flight -- one probably needs nuclear propulsion to travel between star systems. So it'd potentially almost-certainly be discovered at about the right time. The "start time" for the technology checks out for nuclear weapons.
But it's not clear why we'd almost-certainly need to have a cataclysmic nuclear war in the near future. I mean, sure, there's a chance, but a certainty? Enough to wipe out every civilization out there that developed more-quickly than our own?
The problem here is that Sagan's "hold it together long enough to start spreading through the universe and then no single disaster can reasonably wipe you out" is at least plausible for a lot of technologies, like nuclear war.
But a technology that everyone would seek to have and make use of and where some kind of catastrophic event could spread at the speed of light, along information channels...that could potentially destroy a civilization that has even passed the "interstellar travel" barrier and is on multiple star systems. The time requirements for an AI spreading out of control are potentially a lot laxer than having a nuclear war. That's a disaster that doesn't have to happen very shortly after interstellar travel is achieved.
And if it then itself was not stable, collapsed, that'd explain why we don't see AIs running around the universe either.
sighs
But it sure is a technology that it'd be terribly nice to have.
I don't expect that that genie will ever go back in the bottle. To do it, you'd need an arms control treaty, and there'd be a number of problems with that:
The worst problem of arms control treaties is that Usa never adheres to one.
Ok so we ban them, and some incel terminally online hacker on steroids turns 20 arduinos into bombs.
I agree killer robots are dangerous and ethically problematic, just I don't think banning them will keep asshats from making them, including on large scale.
China could pump them out by the billions and we'd probably not know till they were deployed.
The US is conducting live AI experiments on the people of the Global South and exposing some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to dangerous technology it won't use on it's own citizens.
USAians already don't care about any form of violence as long as it's used on minorities, refugees, prisoners, unhoused, etc.
Americans will never care until it starts happening to them.
Outside our borders? Outside my interest in caring.
Just look at all the liberals selfishly attacking leftists for withholding their votes until the genocide stops. “we nEeD to sAvE MY ‘dEmOcRaCy’, oUr ‘dEmOcRaCy’ is mOrE iMpOrTaNt tHaN oUr bOmBs dIsMeMbErRiNg cHiLdReN!”
I'm actually surprised it has taken this long.
What surprises me even more is that organized crime hasn't gotten on board much (yet). Like, screw drive by shootings -- drone dropped grenades on rival gangs and such.
Or that drones haven't been used for "school shooting" type mass casualty attacks.
Or that foreign countries haven't snuck in with a sea can full of drones which fan out and attack infrastructure.
Imagine a cruise missile as a drone carrier that just scatters anti-personnel drones along a flight path, each just finding a person indiscriminately.
If there's anything that Ukraine is teaching us, it's that we don't have countermeasures (yet). The autonomous versions are even scarier.
We do have countermeasures, however many countries mothballed them because we thought them obsolete.
The Gepard which has been proven to be invaluable in a close range AA role, is being pulled from scrapyards. Yes, the radar resolution has to be increased to effectively track small single use drones, but the technology is there.
The state is incredibly far ahead of any individual mass murderer.
For example there have been endless "school shootings" using advanced tech. We just call it "the war in gaza" or whatnot. #freepalestine
There are also a number of ethical concerns associated with autonomous weapons.
That being five sentences after the sentence
There are worries that these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorist groups if their deployment in Africa is scaled up.
I'm worried that the facebooks and elons out there will build private armies of these, not even the terrorists.
That seems to imply that Facebook and Elon are not terrorists. I could make a reasonable argument for Facebook. Elon, I think, has already established his credentials with multiple acts that have led to riots and other violence.
Tuareg nationalists and even Islamic groups in Sahel are not terrorists. UN member states they are fighting against are. That would include France, Russia and who not.
So no, more egalitarian weapon technologies are a good thing. Not ethical concern for sure. If they don't have ethical concerns over jets and tanks.
Probably going to get on a list here...
Imagine how easy it would be to setup an even dozen drones in a pickup bed. Drive to a political rally, pop the bed cover, launch, drive away.
Feed the AI dozens of your target's images and let slip the dogs of war. Or, even lower tech, have someone controlling an overwatch drone and paint your target with a laser. The drones themselves could be cheap as hell, as long as they have a camera feed going back to, uh, some automagical targeting system. Maybe just point a cell phone at the target as if taking a picture?
Only defense I got is a powerful, wide-spectrum frequency jammer. No idea what the legalities look like for the government using them as defensive platforms. I doubt there are laws concerning such tactics.
Am I oversimplifying this? Devil and details and such? Comment and join me on the government's list!
Another thought on drone defense, maybe someone can comment. Why aren't the Russians and Ukrainians carrying 20-gauge anti-drone shotguns? A single-shot unit with a short barrel is super light and the very definition of reliabilty. Seems ideal given that you can tweak a shotgun load 1,000 different ways for spread, distance and weight.
Don't know the ideal combat range, but I've got 8 shotguns of various sorts and I can get any sort of load, anywhere I want. Playing at my range, it's fun to see what I get with different barrel lengths, chokes and charges. If you really want cheap, I've loaded homemade black powder and gravel. LOL, pretty crappy and messy, but it might do for a drone. Bonus! Now you've make a giant smokescreen!
For example, I've got an absolute POS single-shot 20 that weighs nothing, folds in half, never fails to fire and cost about $100. Even has a cheapo red-dot on it, point and click interface. Probably take a day of testing, and a shitload of varied ammo, to shape up an anti-drone weapon. And while we're at it, I have a 1920s single-shot 20 that would get the job done. Lightweight and you can snap the barrel on and off in seconds, 3 parts total.
You can even get fancy and make the choke adjustable by twisting. I have such a shotgun from the 1950s, nothing new here. Choke too tight and you missed? Now it's closer? Yank the choke off and go wide with it.
Training young soldiers should be easy enough. My neighbor's 22-yo wife is hell on wheels with her 20-gauge over-and-under. She's shooting skeet at twice the range I see Russians dying from.
So again, why not load the soldiers with such a rig? At least 1 man per squad?
I remember seeing this video a few years ago, and I'm really scared about drones technology, miniaturization and AI since... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
Oh! I'm getting right after that! We'll probably watch Alter all night now.
Ever seen Uncanny Valley?
Thank you! I have been showing this video to people for years and so far not a single other person has gotten how terrifying this is.
For whatever it's worth, everything they're about to do to you at Guantanamo is not who we are as a country.
I imagine by the time you see the tiny drone and are able to aim at it, it's likely too late. And what if it's a kamikaze drone and the explosion is bigger than anticipated?
Telling your soldiers to shoot at that sounds riskier than "take cover as soon as you think there's a drone".
Anyway my understanding is that so far drones are more useful for destroying stuff than killing people.
A much simpler countermeasure to armed drones is a net.
As for surveillance drones... I'm not sure militarily speaking they care all that much. The enemy already could be watching them with satellites, high altitude drones or balloons that would be nearly impossible to detect, or plain old binoculars, anyway.
Unless it's a covert operation, in which case the enemy launching a drone to find you is already very bad.
I have been screaming about this exact scenario for years now and I have not been able to get a single person to take it seriously. People leave such huge chunks of identity info online, it would be trivial to target someone with a detection package that could easily fit on a drone.
There's no real viable automatic defense options and for the life of me I feel it is only time before some rancid redneck terrorist does this.
The acronym "Laws" is a little too on the nose. I'd ask whether anyone involved in the development of these has seen the documentary film Robocop, but clearly they have and thought it was a great idea.