8 ms·
Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no dif
by neuro_imager 9y ago
Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different.
A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.
- vadimberman 9y ago> There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. What about the neutron bomb? But overall, yes, I agree, a rifle hanging on the wall will eventually go off.
- tehlike 9y agoMatter of time.
- zachrose 9y agoThis is a temporal version of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
- reificator 9y agoThe "No Temporal Scotsman" fallacy if you will.
- mikeash 9y agoA neutron bomb isn't really a separate thing, it's just a nuclear weapon designed for more radiation and less blast. And of course nuclear bombs have been used in war.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 9y agoWe can make it considered unacceptable and against international law. Like chemical weapons. Which still happen, but not as much as they would if the U.S were, say, planning on using them all over the place, doing heavy R&D into them, and selling them to other people. Like, you know, robot kill bots.
- tomjen3 9y agoThe difference is that I can make almost all the components of a killer bot in my living room, and the rest with of the shelf components and access to a maker space with tools.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoYou can make a chemical weapon too, your local hardware store has enough hazardous chemicals. We're only safe, because crazy or truly evil people are rare.
- gaius 9y agoYes and no. The traditional barrier-to-entry for homemade chemical weapons or explosives is that the wannabe terrorist usually ends up killing themselves. That doesn't necessarily hold with drones, depending on what the payload is. You might not even need a payload if your plan is just to ram an airliner. So the threat of drones is much higher than "conventional" terrorism IMO.
- nradov 9y agoHow would you write such a treaty? Limit the CPU speed of weapons systems or something? Totally unenforceable.
- jononor 9y agoCould forbid weapons to take kill actions themselves, each instance having to be activated by a human operator. Could also forbid self-replication of weaponized robots.
- speedplane 9y ago> Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different. Agreed history does not bode well, but it is certainly possible. Communication, treaties, non-violent methods of solving disputes can together prevent this nightmare scenario. Just because it isn't easy doesn't mean we should all throw up our hands and say it's impossible.
- Jach 9y agoI think the proposed ban is: don't develop weapons with software that can make the killing decisions without humans in the loop. That itself isn't so impossible a ban to make something like the CWC out of, but nations couldn't even stop 3D gun printing, despite the same sort of worries. Additionally, even with that ban, you could have the exact same video with the minor difference that each drone sends its video stream to a human somewhere else who presses a button to authorize each suggested-by-the-drone kill. And if we got that far, the pressure to get rid of the ban would be immense, because tool AIs are better as agent AIs. And if we can't even handle regular old microsystems technology, how are we going to handle nanotech? https://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-Preventive-Contemporary/dp/0415407990 https://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-... (and briefly covered in this talk by the same author http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA) discusses it but in the 11 years since it was published I see no reason to think the world is any better prepared.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoYou can't really ban software. Sooner or later someone will write it, opensource it, and it will be on GitHub/piratebay.
- soVeryTired 9y agoIt's probably impossible to stop someone weaponising a drone and piloting it with AI. But you can control how well the result is executed. If a computer scientist teamed up with an engineer and a chemist they could probably jerry rig something that would work. Sort of. But if Northrop Grumman tried to build these things with a billion dollar budget behind them, they might actually succeed in replicating the drones in the video.
- nradov 9y agoWeapons that make killing decisions without humans in the loop have existed for a long time. For example captor naval mines that sit tethered in place and then launch a torpedo when they detect a vessel nearby. Those aren't going away.
- erasemus 9y agoI would guess: we ban civilian drones from carrying explosives, nerve-toxins and other weapons; we invest the bulk of research effort in developing anti-drone drones. The anti-drone drones don't carry weapons that can be used against humans. Advanced drone tech would be less like nuclear weapons, against which there is no defence, and more like vaccines or antidotes. Which is morally very different. Actually morality is an interesting aspect of the video/story. We had the bad guy white male presenter on the stage playing the good guy and claiming that his weapons could distinguish good guys from bad guys (and then of course the targeting of said weapons with a pitifully inadequate and unrealistic set of criteria).
- partycoder 9y agoYou can make any laws. But how exactly do you enforce them? Civilians manufacture and own drones, 3d printers are consumer products now, there are incredibly affordable electronic kits (e.g: Raspberry Pi)... then, for computer vision and AI you've got a lot of free toolkits to pick from... it will be challenging to effectively prevent it even if legislation forbids it.
- erasemus 9y agoThe bulk of the effort goes into R&D for anti-drone tech (this includes monitoring what the bad guys are up to).
- Santosh83 9y agoIt doesn't have to be implemented 100%. Nothing is. But that doesn't stop us from banning bio & chemical weapons. War should be approximately 'human-magnitude' in scale and proportion, or it will simply wipe us out. That's why we have built but not yet routinely used, nuclear weapons. The same strategy needs to be followed for any tech that is far more efficient and autonomous than a human would be.
- hans_mueller 9y agoa hydrogen bomb has never been used.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI stand by my right to a robot army as self-defense in the mean time while I work on achieving the singularity in order to defeat skynet.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoThere's only ever been two nuclear strikes however. Nations do have nuclear arsenals but have, so far, not been stupid enough to use them. Chemical and biological weapons are also largely banned from use. I'm not saying that we can rest assured that we won't all end up as mushroom cloud dust someday in the maybe not distant future. But attempts to curtail the use of really dangerous weapons have paid off in the past. There's no reason why they wouldn't in this case also.
- mungojelly 9y agoBan Capitalism. Ban borders.