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I wouldn’t want to work on these kind of projects as it is clear that eventually these technologies will be used for military purposes. They will lead to a kind

I wouldn’t want to work on these kind of projects as it is clear that eventually these technologies will be used for military purposes. They will lead to a kind of weapon that will get out of control. And will be used to kill many human beings. Let’s make no mistake: This is no innocent research in robotics but lays the foundation for weapons we don’t want to see or have.

yboris 4y ago
Excellent point. Here's an important PSA: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  This seems like an exercise in futility. Robotic killers don't need to be sophisticated or expensive; writing international law is largely useless when the technology isn't limited to nation states.
  - yboris 4y ago
    Even if you're right, just because we might not have the ability to curb all harms doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent the most egregious harms. There are benefits, for example, to making the use of mines and chemical attacks in war illegal.
landryraccoon 4y ago
Do you think it’s a risk that more authoritarian and belligerent states develop them first? War has been a constant force in human history up to and including the present day. I would greatly prefer that if such weapons exist that my society has access to them if others are sure to follow. For that reason I think it’s ethical to work on weapons technology. You could be a principled pacifist, but I think that’s self defeating. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, that did not bring them peace. Arguably if they had nukes, they would not be at war.
- melony 4y ago
  Put the engineers in charge of the executive state, then we can talk.
  - kwatsonafter 4y ago
    Yeah, "guys who work at software companies that don't have degrees in engineering but get to call themselves engineers." Let's put them in charge.
    - melony 4y ago
      Your favored poor "professional engineers" whose greatest claim to fame is being able to follow an ISO certification to build a bridge. They can wallow in poverty (and stay out of politics).
      - ThisIsMyAltFace 4y ago
        Ah, you don't just dislike credentialism, you dislike the credentialed.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  You're missing an important caveat of your own argumentation; if you believe in Liberalism you must by extension have some skepticism concerning the ability of authoritarian states to, "keep up" with freer states in terms of innovation and cultural robustness. Otherwise you're arguing for an arbitrary terminal struggle between competing world cultures. (try reading history). You're basically scared by the current war in Ukraine and are willing to take on an ugly foreign policy position to feel safe. It's going to be a bunch of software developers wearing t-shirts and shorts that eventually bring us to nuclear war. You know, "to keep their daughters safe." Fuck all of you.
  - landryraccoon 4y ago
    I don't believe what you think I do. Authoritarian states have been the default for most of human civilization. Freedom is a good, but it doesn't "auto-win". It can lose, and in fact it has lost, over and over and over again, throughout human history. Native American tribes were arguably more free than Europeans at the time the new world was discovered. Unfortunately, they didn't have guns and horses, and the Europeans did. I would prefer not to end up on the side without the guns and the horses the next time a paradigm changing military technology is discovered. If we want to keep the society we prefer, we have to fight for it. That's not because we like fighting, that's simply the only way it's been made to ever work at any point in history.
trhway 4y ago
The high precision weaponry and drones are already equalizing battlefield for Ukraine. The autonomous drones would be even bigger equalizers, somewhat similar to nukes, and thus leading to more peaceful world. For example a small country can't maintain a top modern air force, and thus for example Russia dominates Ukraine airspace. Autonomous drones would make it a contested situation at least.
fny 4y ago
1. The same argument could have been made about flight itself or even GPS. 2. In general, the tech transfer tends to work the other way: military develops and uses the tech first then come the civilian applications. Speaking of 2, Boeing has developed autonomous drones that are deployed in Ukraine. [0]: https://fortune.com/2022/03/29/artificial-intelligence-drones-autonomous-weapons-loitering-munitions-slaughterbots-ukraine-war/ https://fortune.com/2022/03/29/artificial-intelligence-drone...
solardev 4y ago
But any and all technology can (and will) be militarized. Do you similarly forego working on anything touching encryption? Radios? CPUs? Machine vision? Simulations? Weather? GPS? Automobiles? Flight? Chemistry? Where do you draw the line? Tool usage has always been a, um, double-edged sword... humans will be humans. Targeted drone strikes are at least somewhat less brutal than WW1-style trench combat or hand-to-hand melee combat with swords and spears. Wars in general are getting more precise, with fewer fatalities, over time (https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace). For all this talk of killer robots, the Rwandan genocide killed more with machetes than our drones. Is it necessarily a bad thing that we're replacing boots on the ground with robots in the air? Eventually, one would assume, our opponents would catch up as well, and maybe at some point in the future, battles will be more drone-vs-drone than fighter pilots dogfighting it out. Our killer robots against theirs. Maybe wars are getting more high-tech, but if their body counts are lowering, isn't that a good thing?
- Jolter 4y ago
  I think there is an argument being made that the drone technology enables a distancing of “the person doing the killing” from the action. That being 200 miles, or 2000, from the person being killed lets one take the decision to kill more lightly. Drone operation becomes like a video game. The worry is that such distancing increases the risk of collateral damage, or simply mistaking of targets. There were accusations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the US were bombing weddings and civilian homes.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Sure, but the same could be said for artillery or cruise missiles or guided bombs or nukes, no? Pretty sure similar arguments were made in the past for longbows and trebuchets. Killing at a distance is as old as projectiles. It seems to me collateral damage making the news is a big improvement over the old days. In the past, when giant armies clashed, entire cities were razed, the countryside left barren, huge populations were displaced, women and children enslaved, etc. Now it's a big deal when a single wedding or child is hurt... what used to be so commonplace as to not even be worth mentioning now makes headlines. That's an improvement, isn't it? The ability to perform "surgical" assassinations with precise targeting should be overall less damaging than rolling in with tanks and napalm and carpet bombs. IMO the "facelessness" of drone war is sort of virtue signaling... why should it matter whether you can see your opponents before you kill them? It's not like you're giving every opponent a fair trial with a jury before you kill them. It's war. More precise targeting of a smaller number of targets, even with a higher error rate, should still end up killing fewer people overall than an indiscriminate total war. Now, more selfishly, from a US national security perspective: When we're expecting big powerful states again as opponents (as in, China or Russia instead of Afghanistan or Iraq), frankly, we'll need all the help we can get. It's one thing to mourn innocent Afghan civilians lost during a small-scale conflict, it's another thing to be ill-equipped to handle the bigger threats of the future against enemies who aren't at all concerned with human rights. I don't think it is realistic to expect a peaceful, utopian future for our species in the near-term. All signs point to conflicts escalating as resources diminish, democracies wane, authoritarianism rising, and climate change exacerbating divides. As cold wars heat back up and proxy wars proliferate, we'll either be sending in more technology or more troops. Personally, I'd rather it be American drones than American lives.
golemiprague 4y ago
What's wrong with military purposes and how do you know what exactly it will lead to? If anything the most effective weapons lead to deterrence at best and cold war at worst, actual war are fought with ak47.

yboris 4y ago

Excellent point. Here's an important PSA: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/

anigbrowl 4y ago
This seems like an exercise in futility. Robotic killers don't need to be sophisticated or expensive; writing international law is largely useless when the technology isn't limited to nation states.
- yboris 4y ago
  Even if you're right, just because we might not have the ability to curb all harms doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent the most egregious harms. There are benefits, for example, to making the use of mines and chemical attacks in war illegal.

landryraccoon 4y ago

Do you think it’s a risk that more authoritarian and belligerent states develop them first? War has been a constant force in human history up to and including the present day. I would greatly prefer that if such weapons exist that my society has access to them if others are sure to follow. For that reason I think it’s ethical to work on weapons technology. You could be a principled pacifist, but I think that’s self defeating. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, that did not bring them peace. Arguably if they had nukes, they would not be at war.

melony 4y ago
Put the engineers in charge of the executive state, then we can talk.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  Yeah, "guys who work at software companies that don't have degrees in engineering but get to call themselves engineers." Let's put them in charge.
  - melony 4y ago
    Your favored poor "professional engineers" whose greatest claim to fame is being able to follow an ISO certification to build a bridge. They can wallow in poverty (and stay out of politics).
    - ThisIsMyAltFace 4y ago
      Ah, you don't just dislike credentialism, you dislike the credentialed.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
You're missing an important caveat of your own argumentation; if you believe in Liberalism you must by extension have some skepticism concerning the ability of authoritarian states to, "keep up" with freer states in terms of innovation and cultural robustness. Otherwise you're arguing for an arbitrary terminal struggle between competing world cultures. (try reading history). You're basically scared by the current war in Ukraine and are willing to take on an ugly foreign policy position to feel safe. It's going to be a bunch of software developers wearing t-shirts and shorts that eventually bring us to nuclear war. You know, "to keep their daughters safe." Fuck all of you.
- landryraccoon 4y ago
  I don't believe what you think I do. Authoritarian states have been the default for most of human civilization. Freedom is a good, but it doesn't "auto-win". It can lose, and in fact it has lost, over and over and over again, throughout human history. Native American tribes were arguably more free than Europeans at the time the new world was discovered. Unfortunately, they didn't have guns and horses, and the Europeans did. I would prefer not to end up on the side without the guns and the horses the next time a paradigm changing military technology is discovered. If we want to keep the society we prefer, we have to fight for it. That's not because we like fighting, that's simply the only way it's been made to ever work at any point in history.

trhway 4y ago

The high precision weaponry and drones are already equalizing battlefield for Ukraine. The autonomous drones would be even bigger equalizers, somewhat similar to nukes, and thus leading to more peaceful world. For example a small country can't maintain a top modern air force, and thus for example Russia dominates Ukraine airspace. Autonomous drones would make it a contested situation at least.

fny 4y ago

1. The same argument could have been made about flight itself or even GPS. 2. In general, the tech transfer tends to work the other way: military develops and uses the tech first then come the civilian applications. Speaking of 2, Boeing has developed autonomous drones that are deployed in Ukraine. [0]: https://fortune.com/2022/03/29/artificial-intelligence-drones-autonomous-weapons-loitering-munitions-slaughterbots-ukraine-war/ https://fortune.com/2022/03/29/artificial-intelligence-drone...

solardev 4y ago

But any and all technology can (and will) be militarized. Do you similarly forego working on anything touching encryption? Radios? CPUs? Machine vision? Simulations? Weather? GPS? Automobiles? Flight? Chemistry? Where do you draw the line? Tool usage has always been a, um, double-edged sword... humans will be humans. Targeted drone strikes are at least somewhat less brutal than WW1-style trench combat or hand-to-hand melee combat with swords and spears. Wars in general are getting more precise, with fewer fatalities, over time (https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace). For all this talk of killer robots, the Rwandan genocide killed more with machetes than our drones. Is it necessarily a bad thing that we're replacing boots on the ground with robots in the air? Eventually, one would assume, our opponents would catch up as well, and maybe at some point in the future, battles will be more drone-vs-drone than fighter pilots dogfighting it out. Our killer robots against theirs. Maybe wars are getting more high-tech, but if their body counts are lowering, isn't that a good thing?

Jolter 4y ago
I think there is an argument being made that the drone technology enables a distancing of “the person doing the killing” from the action. That being 200 miles, or 2000, from the person being killed lets one take the decision to kill more lightly. Drone operation becomes like a video game. The worry is that such distancing increases the risk of collateral damage, or simply mistaking of targets. There were accusations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the US were bombing weddings and civilian homes.
- solardev 4y ago
  Sure, but the same could be said for artillery or cruise missiles or guided bombs or nukes, no? Pretty sure similar arguments were made in the past for longbows and trebuchets. Killing at a distance is as old as projectiles. It seems to me collateral damage making the news is a big improvement over the old days. In the past, when giant armies clashed, entire cities were razed, the countryside left barren, huge populations were displaced, women and children enslaved, etc. Now it's a big deal when a single wedding or child is hurt... what used to be so commonplace as to not even be worth mentioning now makes headlines. That's an improvement, isn't it? The ability to perform "surgical" assassinations with precise targeting should be overall less damaging than rolling in with tanks and napalm and carpet bombs. IMO the "facelessness" of drone war is sort of virtue signaling... why should it matter whether you can see your opponents before you kill them? It's not like you're giving every opponent a fair trial with a jury before you kill them. It's war. More precise targeting of a smaller number of targets, even with a higher error rate, should still end up killing fewer people overall than an indiscriminate total war. Now, more selfishly, from a US national security perspective: When we're expecting big powerful states again as opponents (as in, China or Russia instead of Afghanistan or Iraq), frankly, we'll need all the help we can get. It's one thing to mourn innocent Afghan civilians lost during a small-scale conflict, it's another thing to be ill-equipped to handle the bigger threats of the future against enemies who aren't at all concerned with human rights. I don't think it is realistic to expect a peaceful, utopian future for our species in the near-term. All signs point to conflicts escalating as resources diminish, democracies wane, authoritarianism rising, and climate change exacerbating divides. As cold wars heat back up and proxy wars proliferate, we'll either be sending in more technology or more troops. Personally, I'd rather it be American drones than American lives.

golemiprague 4y ago

What's wrong with military purposes and how do you know what exactly it will lead to? If anything the most effective weapons lead to deterrence at best and cold war at worst, actual war are fought with ak47.