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This article is thoughtful and naive at the same time. Deploying an autonomous weapon is just like deploying any other weapon. Once a gun is fired, the human is
by darkerside 4y ago
This article is thoughtful and naive at the same time. Deploying an autonomous weapon is just like deploying any other weapon. Once a gun is fired, the human is out of the loop. Autonomous weapons will end up the same way. People will get to exercise judgement early and late, but AI will make decisions during execution, just like a bullet follows the flight path.
The reason we need humans is for accountability. You can't court marshal a machine. Firing the operator doesn't fix anything or prevent it from happening again (next operator will be just as fallible), it just satisfies some primal part of our brains that needs to blame someone when something bad happens.
- taylorius 4y agoThe difference lies in the predictability, I would say. A bullet flies according to well understood equations of motion, whereas an A.I - no-one really knows how it might be fooled, or what mistakes it could make.
- darkerside 4y agoI guess the better analogue is directing troops.
- jameshart 4y agoCutting the wires and letting a torpedo run in active homing mode and find and select its own target has been part of submarine warfare practice for decades. We tolerate it because there aren’t generally a lot of civilians or even friendly fire risks in submarine engagement environments.
- jayd16 4y agoThat's one way to think about it. However, don't we usually just outright ban weapons with longer term lethality? A bullet is lethal for seconds while mines are lethal for years. If autonomous drones are lethal for days, weeks or even months, should we consider them a war crime?
- darkerside 4y agoI think it's potentially different in that they can be turned off at any time.
- jameshart 4y agoCan they? A loitering drone that can be switched off at any time by its operator is a loitering drone that contains a vulnerability that enables it to be turned off at any time by an enemy. There is some doomsday logic in deployment of ‘fire and forget’ weapons systems. ‘Once this thing is turned on even I can’t stop it’.
- lazide 4y agoMines are still deployed all the time. Check out YouTube and you’ll see plenty of videos of Russian tanks getting blown up by Ukrainian ones, and civilians navigating Russian ones across highways there. Plenty of people die decades later from chemical and physical effects of various weapons deployed all the time (not even counting the depleted uranium issues in Iraq). White phosphorous is just one such example.
- kragen 4y agoHow is white phosphorus an example? Are you thinking of someone getting liver or kidney damage by absorbing white phosphorus, barely surviving, and lingering for a decade or two in delicate health before succumbing to high blood pressure? That sounds like the same kind of thing as someone getting injured by a bullet, which is a lot more common than WP. Any white phosphorus left in the environment is going to oxidize within a few days into phosphoric acid (the tart flavor of Coca-Cola), and that will get neutralized into phosphate fertilizer pretty quickly, unless it's in some kind of deadly low-pH environment like acid mine drainage.
- lazide 4y agoGood point on WP - I was mixing it in with agent orange, DU projectiles, UXO decades after the fact, etc. but that isn’t really fair. Terrible in the moment, but except for the scars, not likely a problem once someone heals up.