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I can see some value to some kind of "assassin in a box" that turns any malcontent with a few thousand dollars into an expert sniper, or some set of 3D-printabl

I can see some value to some kind of "assassin in a box" that turns any malcontent with a few thousand dollars into an expert sniper, or some set of 3D-printable parts that could do the same to an off-the-shelf rifle. However, JFK was shot from just a hundred yards away with a gun designed in 1891, Jo Cox was killed with a single-shot .22 hunting rifle and Shinzou Abe was killed by a gun made of duck tape, metal pipe and match-heads by someone with basically no firearms experience. It's clear that access to high-tech firearms or the skills to use them is not the main barrier to assassinations. When considering killing individuals, for the people with the motivation to do so, the labour involved in actually doing the killing is such a small part of the process that it's not something there's value in automating. Once they've picked a target, acquired the weapon and planned the attack, 99% of the work is already done, so I'm still not really seeing the extra danger from AI here.

dist-epoch 4y ago
The danger about AI and drones/robots is scaling. It's difficult to find 100 people to execute an operation on the same day, most likely some of them would be informants and the information would leak. But you can buy 100 drones under false pretense and distribute them, maybe even in different cities. Imagine a LLM talking with 100 delivery agents and saying something like "I need you to deliver the drone at this address, unpack it, charge it, plug a stick with this software I'm emailing you with and leave the window open for an artistic experiment I'm doing"
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  And then what? You injure a hundred individual people by ramming? Maybe some of them die? Your drone can't exactly carry a meaningful payload since that'll look super sus to the delivery driver. "Yes, take the 40mm grenade and load it into the drone and then let it free." Meanwhile, for less than a tenth of that investment, a guy in a Las Vegas hotel room with a bunch of rifles killed 60 people and injured 400. Smart loiter munitions make sense if you're the military and have billions of dollars, but all the scenarios people come up with for these killer drones seem very expensive and not much more deadly when compared with knives, guns, trucks or bombs.

dist-epoch 4y ago

The danger about AI and drones/robots is scaling. It's difficult to find 100 people to execute an operation on the same day, most likely some of them would be informants and the information would leak. But you can buy 100 drones under false pretense and distribute them, maybe even in different cities. Imagine a LLM talking with 100 delivery agents and saying something like "I need you to deliver the drone at this address, unpack it, charge it, plug a stick with this software I'm emailing you with and leave the window open for an artistic experiment I'm doing"

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
And then what? You injure a hundred individual people by ramming? Maybe some of them die? Your drone can't exactly carry a meaningful payload since that'll look super sus to the delivery driver. "Yes, take the 40mm grenade and load it into the drone and then let it free." Meanwhile, for less than a tenth of that investment, a guy in a Las Vegas hotel room with a bunch of rifles killed 60 people and injured 400. Smart loiter munitions make sense if you're the military and have billions of dollars, but all the scenarios people come up with for these killer drones seem very expensive and not much more deadly when compared with knives, guns, trucks or bombs.