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Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

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Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#91

Post by gaius »

wnkrshm wrote: post #83
oliwarner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder how hard it would really be to detect and target somebody whose scope is laser-ranging and has wifi. These seem like tactical giveaways. That's not to say this sort of technology couldn't be useful, but putting active broadcasting equipment on your gun is going to backfire in next generation warfare.

It's trivial to figure out where a ranging laser comes from, it's just that asymmetric warfare enables you to use them with impunity

You can but NODs retail now that are halfway as good as the military state-of-the-art but a tiny fraction of the price. People think the Taliban, ISIS et al are just these desert rednecks but the truth is that they are well trained (originally by US Special Forces to fight the Soviets), highly experienced - much more so than any Western soldier most of whom do only a couple of tours - well funded and technologically sophisticated enough to run advanced psyops via social media.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#92

Post by gaius »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #52
tomjen3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that I can make almost all the components of a killer bot in my living room, and the rest with of the shelf components and access to a maker space with tools.

You can make a chemical weapon too, your local hardware store has enough hazardous chemicals. We're only safe, because crazy or truly evil people are rare.

Yes and no. The traditional barrier-to-entry for homemade chemical weapons or explosives is that the wannabe terrorist usually ends up killing themselves. That doesn't necessarily hold with drones, depending on what the payload is. You might not even need a payload if your plan is just to ram an airliner. So the threat of drones is much higher than "conventional" terrorism IMO.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#93

Post by mikeash »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #31
neuro_imager wrote: post #3

Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different. A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.

We can make it considered unacceptable and against international law. Like chemical weapons. Which still happen, but not as much as they would if the U.S were, say, planning on using them all over the place, doing heavy R&D into them, and selling them to other people. Like, you know, robot kill bots.

Most of the reason chemical weapons don't get used is because they're not very effective. It's hard to disperse them on the battlefield, changing weather has a nasty habit of blowing the stuff back onto your own troops, and protective gear is cheap enough to equip everyone in an army. I'm pretty sure that everyone was willing to ban them internationally not just because they're horrible but also because they're not very useful.

Compare with nuclear weapons, which are way worse and have a lot of support for a ban, but there's no serious hope of that ever happening, because they are really good at killing people and destroying stuff.

Seems to me that a ban is only realistic if the stuff doesn't work well.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#94

Post by mikeash »

vadimberman wrote: post #9
neuro_imager wrote: post #3

Unfortunately I don't see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different. A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.

> There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. What about the neutron bomb? But overall, yes, I agree, a rifle hanging on the wall will eventually go off.

A neutron bomb isn't really a separate thing, it's just a nuclear weapon designed for more radiation and less blast. And of course nuclear bombs have been used in war.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#95

Post by gaius »

yorwba wrote: post #87
Joeri wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you deploy automated drone factories that send out millions of these things, and then have an army of people all pressing "kill" buttons as if they were doing a quick-fire arcade game, without even seeing what they were killing, it would comply with the rules you describe.

Those rules would be enforced by humans, and humans don't tend to be very impressed by attempts to follow the letter of the law while violating its spirit. Laws as written have all kinds of obvious loopholes, but they are intentionally vague enough that a judge can look at your "obvious loophole" and decide that you are in violation anyway.

hose rules would be enforced by humans, and humans don't tend to be very impressed by attempts to follow the letter of the law while violating its spirit.

That Google, Apple, Uber et al pay so very little tax suggests that that is an optimistic appraisal.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#96

Post by gaius »

sorokod wrote: post #48
daxorid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is that some of us really look forward to real-life sentry gun turrets; we actually want this future.

Systems such as Phalanx CISW with fully automatic mode have been available for ages.

Systems such as Phalanx CISW with fully automatic mode have been available for ages

Phalanx doesn't work tho' :-) In 1991 Iraqi forces launched a Silkworm missile against USS Missouri. The ship launched decoys... and its Phalanx guns promptly targeted those decoys. Fortunately there was a Royal Navy ship, HMS Gloucester, in the vicinity which dealt with the problem with a good British weapon, the Sea Dart missile. This was the first real "drone on drone" combat, if you will.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#98

Post by phkahler »

hans_mueller wrote: post #65
XorNot wrote: post #55

The message of this film feels extremely confused - probably because it's trying to single-mindedly push an agenda rather then explore the problem space. In a world where apparently drone-swarms are this cheap...what, no one ever developed counter-drones? It's the reason grey goo isn't a realistic scenario for nanotechnology: the goo has to replicate, whereas all the counter-goo has to do is kill it. Same issue: a wo…

to develop countermeasures is always way harder than developing an assaulting technology. like firing a rocket is easy, but catching it mid flight is very difficult.

That's funny, I already have anti-drone technology in my kitchen. Take the magnetron from the microwave and use a Wok as a dish to create an approximately directional 1kW microwave energy weapon. Aim it at the swarm of drones and sweep back and forth. They'll all fall out of the air up to some range.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#99

Post by jstanley »

jononor wrote: post #74
nradov wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you write such a treaty? Limit the CPU speed of weapons systems or something? Totally unenforceable.

Could forbid weapons to take kill actions themselves, each instance having to be activated by a human operator. Could also forbid self-replication of weaponized robots.

Why not go one step further and say that nobody is allowed to take a kill action? Killing is murder.

Not sarcastic.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#100

Post by sorokod »

gaius wrote: post #96
sorokod wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systems such as Phalanx CISW with fully automatic mode have been available for ages.

Systems such as Phalanx CISW with fully automatic mode have been available for ages Phalanx doesn't work tho' :-) In 1991 Iraqi forces launched a Silkworm missile against USS Missouri. The ship launched decoys... and its Phalanx guns promptly targeted those decoys. Fortunately there was a Royal Navy ship, HMS Gloucester, in the vicinity which dealt with the problem with a good British weapon, the Sea Dart missile. Th…

I expect the software was upgraded several times since. Also, I expect drone countermeasures coevolve with drones.
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