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Terrifying and fascinating, as all good wake-up calls should be. In the future, miniature exploding drones could indeed autonomously, distinguish between crani

Terrifying and fascinating, as all good wake-up calls should be. In the future, miniature exploding drones could indeed autonomously, distinguish between cranium and body, plot a flight route and divebomb at their victim. But, I don't think these skull-crackers will be fully autonomous, even with significant advances and development. Given the chance of collateral damage and the "fuzziness" of algorithms, the kill command or sequence will be still left to a human operator, like how America does so in the skies of Pakistan or with the machine-gun robots of the Middle-East[1]. In my mind, the the computer would display potential targets via live capture, and the human in the chair would cycle through them, and after filtering out the mistakes (a human dummy, a picture on the wall), type "y". Militaries would have this check less out of "consider the ethics and morality!" and more out of rational avoid-friendly-fire and ensure-maximum accuracy-of-the-payload. One exception to this approach could be indiscriminate killing; where the designers intentionally program the drones to lobotomize any target within a geographic range or a time, as long as that target exceeds a certain threshold. This approach is guaranteed to result in a lot of false positives, but would still be remarkably efficient for the purpose of terror or localized warfare. [2] On a side note, YouTube recommended a follow up video, depicting a real-life swarm, howling and circling around a target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLP0pAGbE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLP0pAGbE0 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON [2]: Even remote controlled drones strikes are pretty iffy on who they kill, so it's not like unlikely that less savory actors won't mind blanketing swaths of countries with skull-crackers. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-reveal-uncomfortable-truth-us-is-often-unsure-about-who-will-die.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-...

briga 9y ago
I think with modern advances in facial recognition technologies, a human participant wont be necessary. Have you seen how accurate these models are nowadays? Many big tech companies have already released tools that make it possible for just about anyone who can write code to implement sophisticated CNN models for facial recognition. These technologies are more accessible currently than they've ever been.
mtgx 9y ago
I think it's naive to think their primary focus will be collateral damage. Is that really the focus in any war at all? https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casualties-civilian https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casua... And that's just the targeting of the drones themselves. But how accurate is the intelligence targeting? Post-Snowden we found out that they were killing people mainly based on what SIM card the targets carried with them. Plus, they consider any male that is killed and above 16 years old as a terrorist. It's harder not to be "accurate" when that's your definition of a target... Also, you're forgetting one aspect of this. The cheaper the tech becomes, the easier it will be used. Just like we now kill 100x more people with drone strikes that we did with airstrikes, in the future we may be kill 100-1,000x more people with automated drones, because it's so much easier to "get rid of the baddies". Do you actually think they'll hire 100x more people to operate those machines and "have final say"? Yeah, no way that's how they'll think about it - unless we make them think differently about it and not to allow the automated kill machines to ever be built/sent. I mean, given the type of politicians the U.S. government tends to have these days, which option do you think they'll choose? A 10-year dragged out war against a group like ISIS, or "just sending 10,000 automated drones" into multiple "hot areas" and "finish the job within a month"? Can you not see how their logic would go, and that we'll actually need a lot of people to oppose that type of thinking to ensure it will not happen? But will there be a lot of people to ensure that doesn't happen, if say a terrorist group takes out the White House? Or will everyone think "those 100,000 people all killed automatically by the drones deserved it for destroying our White House!!". Heck, Trump already asked the military "for the biggest bomb they can send" - a bomb that was built but never used before - and it wasn't even a situation of the US being under huge immediate threat at the time. It was mainly done for PR purposes for Trump to show how macho he is and how he "gets things done." The worst part about it is that the media seemed gleeful about it, rather than condemning him. I think it would be best to ensure the machines are not built in the first place. There are too many trigger-happy people that would send such drones out.
- builditand 9y ago
  Theoretically we can make building and using them illegal, but there's no way to prevent building and using these machines.
sorokod 9y ago
What makes a positive "false" is not necessarily objective. It may be fluid and entirely dependent on the "mission parameters". Consider two states at war where the bots are by design targeting a specific genetic fenotype.

briga 9y ago

I think with modern advances in facial recognition technologies, a human participant wont be necessary. Have you seen how accurate these models are nowadays? Many big tech companies have already released tools that make it possible for just about anyone who can write code to implement sophisticated CNN models for facial recognition. These technologies are more accessible currently than they've ever been.

mtgx 9y ago

I think it's naive to think their primary focus will be collateral damage. Is that really the focus in any war at all? https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casualties-civilian https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/16/16666628/iraq-nyt-casua... And that's just the targeting of the drones themselves. But how accurate is the intelligence targeting? Post-Snowden we found out that they were killing people mainly based on what SIM card the targets carried with them. Plus, they consider any male that is killed and above 16 years old as a terrorist. It's harder not to be "accurate" when that's your definition of a target... Also, you're forgetting one aspect of this. The cheaper the tech becomes, the easier it will be used. Just like we now kill 100x more people with drone strikes that we did with airstrikes, in the future we may be kill 100-1,000x more people with automated drones, because it's so much easier to "get rid of the baddies". Do you actually think they'll hire 100x more people to operate those machines and "have final say"? Yeah, no way that's how they'll think about it - unless we make them think differently about it and not to allow the automated kill machines to ever be built/sent. I mean, given the type of politicians the U.S. government tends to have these days, which option do you think they'll choose? A 10-year dragged out war against a group like ISIS, or "just sending 10,000 automated drones" into multiple "hot areas" and "finish the job within a month"? Can you not see how their logic would go, and that we'll actually need a lot of people to oppose that type of thinking to ensure it will not happen? But will there be a lot of people to ensure that doesn't happen, if say a terrorist group takes out the White House? Or will everyone think "those 100,000 people all killed automatically by the drones deserved it for destroying our White House!!". Heck, Trump already asked the military "for the biggest bomb they can send" - a bomb that was built but never used before - and it wasn't even a situation of the US being under huge immediate threat at the time. It was mainly done for PR purposes for Trump to show how macho he is and how he "gets things done." The worst part about it is that the media seemed gleeful about it, rather than condemning him. I think it would be best to ensure the machines are not built in the first place. There are too many trigger-happy people that would send such drones out.

builditand 9y ago
Theoretically we can make building and using them illegal, but there's no way to prevent building and using these machines.

sorokod 9y ago

What makes a positive "false" is not necessarily objective. It may be fluid and entirely dependent on the "mission parameters". Consider two states at war where the bots are by design targeting a specific genetic fenotype.