9 ms·

While many think that they should not work on such projects, my take is the opposite. If we don't work on these projects, then we will not have autonomous kill

• kache_ 4y ago
  • rg111 4y ago
    One should keep worrying about the people that have their hands on these weapons. It's the humans that people should keep worrying about seriously. AI is far, far, far away from having a will.
    • kache_ 4y ago
      I'd rather have the humans that live in my backyard with the weapons, than people with a less vested interest in my safety.
  • sokoloff 4y ago
    I don’t fully trust America; nevertheless having America build these systems is the right thing for Americans as I trust other countries less to have Americans’ best interests in mind.
  • kwatsonafter 4y ago
    I think it would do well for America's national security if non-experts didn't give their opinions publicly and this was enforced through our legal system.
    • anigbrowl 4y ago
      Evergreen observation: https://www.theonion.com/study-38-percent-of-people-not-actually-entitled-to-th-1819569126 https://www.theonion.com/study-38-percent-of-people-not-actu...
    • kache_ 4y ago
      Here's a few 'non-experts' who just started building and selling to the government: https://www.anduril.com/ https://www.anduril.com/ Seems like they're doing quite well, don't you think? No matter how upset it makes you, you can't stop us hackers from building technology
  • black_puppydog 4y ago
    the internet needs a non-sarcasm marker to reduce ambiguity. should be manatory to use on any comment. 0_o
    • kache_ 4y ago
      I'm not being sarcastic
      • black_puppydog 4y ago
        That's a bit scary for large parts of the world then.
  • arun_m 4y ago
    While testing nuclear weapons is not in best interests of world, the 5 countries did it before 1968 got an advantage due to NPT. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
• kwatsonafter 4y ago
  You might find this interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/ukraine-russia-moskva-military-marine-corps/629930/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/ukraine-ru...
  • the_af 4y ago
    Interesting but puzzling at the same time. I don't disagree modern wars will result in whole classes of equipment being found obsolete or not cost effective, but this strikes me as odd: [quote from the article] > "The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune." Well, none of those types of missiles are fundamentally new, and have existed in one way or another for decades (e.g. the HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet anti-ship missile during the Falklands War in 1982!). More importantly, they work because the Ukrainians are fighting a war of resistance against an invading force; were they to go on the offensive (hypothetical, imagine they -- like the Soviet Union in WWII -- were to advance into Moscow and decapitate its leadership) they would need tanks, and airplanes, and other allegedly "obsolete" equipment. The Ukrainian defense works where they are given support and weapons by foreign powers and because of a Russian mismanaged offensive. Say -- again for the sake of argument -- the invasion was a coordinated effort by NATO against an hypothetical Ukrainian rogue state. How long would they last with their Stingers and Neptune anti-ship missiles? As a devil's advocate against my own argument, Afghanistan ended up "defeating" the US in the very long run, for reasons not directly related to the weapons they used. And what weapons did they use, anyway? (Good old) Stinger, RPGs and AKs? No Neptunes in sight.
• antisthenes 4y ago
  > Turkey already have autonomous predator drones [0], and they have been used in the battlefield. Turkey is part of NATO. > China, Iran, and Russia do (they surely do or soon will), we are at massive disadvantage. Countries like Iran and Russia aren't able to sustain an electronics industry to produce something as complicated as AI Computer vision drones. I hope I don't need to explain why. > We will have to deploy humans on the field when they won't have to. That is a gap too wide to exist. It is more fundamental than gunpowder. This is unsubstantiated fear mongering. The economies are too intertwined for either US or China to deploy their forces full-scale. If we ever get to the point of a full-scale confrontation, some AI-drones will be the least of your worries. > AI scientists of today should help develop autonomous killing machines. Freedom isn't free. Yikes.
  • loudmax 4y ago
    > The economies are too intertwined for either US or China to deploy their forces full-scale. This was was a common belief about Europe before World War One. Unfortunately, that didn't prevent the carnage. I tend to agree with you about the existential danger of full-scale confrontation. And to be fair, your concerns about these weapon systems are well founded. These things are really dangerous and we need to think very carefully about how they're developed and deployed. But as we see in Ukraine, there's a lot of scope for limited confrontation. In this case we'll want access to deadlier weapons than our enemies have access to. To those of us that believe in liberal democracy, this isn't just about one team vs another. This really is about living in a world where freedom is the norm rather than living in fear of an autocrat.
• UberFly 4y ago
  I completely agree with your post but say with only partial sarcasm that the US/EU will develop these first, followed shortly by China but only after they steal the technology behind it. Then a trickle-down from there.
• yoaviram 4y ago
  You do realise that right now on a Chinese version of hacker news, a Chinese version of you is making the same argument? The messed up aspects of this world aren't inevitable, we all take part.
  • archontes 4y ago
    This is the tragedy of the commons. Its solution is a central authority. How do we get there?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • belval 4y ago
    As they should, with 8 billions inhabitants, assuming that peace can be kept on good intentions is the pacifist fallacy. We just got a wonderful example with the invasion of Ukraine. You can be nice, you can play nice, you can apply sanctions, send strongly worded statement, and yet Ukrainians are dying and tanks are still rolling in. You know what's stopping the Russians? Javelins and Bayraktars.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      The right lesson to learn from Ukraine is that big countries are ever willing to sacrifice small countries in their bids for power. Ukrainians would have been much better off had they worked with Russia to avoid or quickly settle the war, especially after heroically successfully resisting the blitzkrieg-style initial invasion. Instead, goaded on the by the USA and Europe, they are fighting a losing war that will hurt tens or hundreds of thousands over the coming years. There is 0 chance Russia will back off. Of course, it will also weaken Russia, which is what Europe and the USA actually want. Putin fell right into their trap, and Ukraine thinks it's being helped.
      • lovich 4y ago
        > Ukrainians would have been much better off had they worked with Russia to avoid or quickly settle the war, especially after heroically successfully resisting the blitzkrieg-style initial invasion. By that logic wouldn’t the Russians be much better off if they had worked with the international community to avoid this war as their industrial base is crumbling around them and they are losing massive amounts of manpower? Russia could take Ukraine today with no more materiel losses and they will be worse off than when they started. The only way they could consider this a win is if they consider ideological reasons, but if you include those you can’t say the Ukrainians would be better off if they value freedom more than they value staying alive
• martindbp 4y ago
  Yes, the invasion of Ukraine hopefully showed how naive this type of thinking is, i.e. "I hate war, therefore I won't support or work on defense technologies".
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    The invasion of Ukraine has shown precisely the opposite: playing military games gets youe neighbours antsy, and an antsy empire just invades to calm its nerves. If Ukraine hadn't been slowly de facto integrating into NATO (NATO weapons, NATO training, and even joint military exercises with NATO, on Ukrainian soil), it would have been much harder for Putin to justify the extreme costs this invasion is having on his economy.
    • lovich 4y ago
      If the Ukraine invasion was in a vacuum maybe but Russia has set it sights on a number of nations regardless of their NATO involvement. They’re absorbing Belarus soon, was Belarus getting too cozy with NATO?
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      "Well, I only robbed your house because you threatened to join the neighborhood watch."
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        While international politics is unsavory, it is what it is. Have you seen the US response to the Solomon Islands signing a military treaty with China? They made it clear that if there is any attempt at establishing a Chinese military base there, the US wouldn't put a military response off the table.
        • lovich 4y ago
          The right lesson to learn from Russia is that big countries are ever willing to sacrifice small countries in their bids for power. Russians would have been much better off had they worked with NATO to avoid or quickly settle the proxy war, especially after heroically sacrificing more soldiers and weaponry in the initial invasion then they had in Afghanistan Instead, goaded on the by the oligarchs and Putin, they are fighting a losing war that will hurt tens or hundreds of thousands over the coming years. There is 0 chance NATO will back off. Of course, it will also empower Putin, which is what Putin and the Oligarchs actually want. Russia fell right into their trap, and thinks they are being helped empowered.
• wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  The end game of intelligent autonomous weapons are dangerous to everyone. Google slaughterbots. We've been pretty successful in stopping major nation states from using bioweapons so far. Maybe we can do the same for AI. Maybe we can't. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and the very least we can do is not start a bloody arms race as to who can develop the best autonomous killing machine.
  • rg111 4y ago
    > We've been pretty successful in stopping major nation states from using bioweapons so far. I am sure everyone has it. Every major nations. Although they might not use it. > AI I am sure it is already there. Many have it. Turkey, and at least China. Maybe Israel and the US. And it will not come in clear paradigms, I think. Like FSD in Tesla. Use will happen for components first, then major things, then maybe one day, fully autonomous. How do you even regulize it? What happens if they use Logistic Regression? That's just Stat, right? What if add one more layer? Then that becomes MLP, and in the AI domain. What about CNNs? Transformers? Where do you draw the line? What if the missile truck uses something like FSD? > arms race This isn't going to be like other arms races. This will fundamentally change all weapons. And should not be used where it is not needed, though. Also, gone are the days when countries flaunted big missiles. How would even other countries know, if you don't want them to?
  • anigbrowl 4y ago
    It's just autonomous technology in general. Making an autonomously-operable object destructive is the easy bit. Widespread use is a lot closer and easier than people realize, but I'd rather not spell out why that is.
    • extrememacaroni 4y ago
      Could it be... ... ... the self driving CARS?
  • lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    >We've been pretty successful in stopping major nation states from using bioweapons so far. Name a major state that has experienced existential war since their invention. Same for nukes. "We've been successful in stopping" - there has been no "we" doing any "stopping". There have only been "others" "choosing not to". There would reasonably be some point of conflict where the decision falls the other way.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Hard agree. The only counter to an enemy AI swarm or a runaway AI swarm is another AI swarm. Sure, we'll probably fuck it up, but at least there's a chance for us. The alternative is simply accept Chinese rule. That's it. Those are our choices. And for the pacifists, China is still going to develop their own AI swarm, and they could lose control of it, so dying is still on the cards with the second one, too. I love people here focusing on the "end game". Yes, this is the horror: the rational choice is to develop the technology that will likely kill us all. They argue "The end-game is so bad that we must lose the mid-game", as if that will stop other nations from developing the end-game technology! Really, anybody who isn't already a monk who lives entirely off the land through their own labor, doesn't got to make any moral argument, or argument about "well, Chinese rule wouldn't be so bad - we're just fighting for culture". Give up your culture, then we'll talk. Everyone who believes there are other choices are simply living in their "just world" fantasy.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    This same logic could be used to justify any atrocity. What exactly makes you so sure China is developing such dangerous technology? And even if they are, why isn't it a better idea to negotiate an international ban on this type of research instead of driving full force into it? Creating ever more powerful weapons is a fool's game, and every knowing participant is a human monster.
    • lowbloodsugar 4y ago
      My premise assumes that at least one adversary will develop these weapons whether we do or not. Your premise assumes that everyone would agree not to do it, and also keep that agreement. This is basic game theory. Your position is indefensible. It's not about monsters, or morals. It's just math.
• cjbgkagh 4y ago
  “Mr President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”
  • stevenalowe 4y ago
    Typo: should be “minecraft gap!”
• bob1029 4y ago
  > If we don't work on these projects, then we will not have autonomous killing machines, and our rivals will. My biggest fear is that the next generation of warfare is going to be lost only due to lack of imagination. I am starting to see a new opportunity emerge for the skills and tools held by AAA game studios and fintechs. Building a UX/UI that allows for you to interact with your next-gen weapons system is going to be the biggest challenge in my view. How does 1 person manage a fleet of 10k drones in a strategic conflict? How do you integrate hundreds/thousands of these fleets into a cohesive force? You are talking about potentially millions of battlefield actors. And billions of discrete events per second. How do you process all of this data and then make a rational decision by the time the next loop comes around? Every millisecond that goes by without a decision is a substantial step closer to defeat.