hybrid autonomous makes infinitely more sense than this shit. but tbh if the boundaries work... it's not super different from an artillery barrage.
Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
191–200 of 223 posts
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#192Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#193The meta keeps evolving. I suppose the next step is to create drones designed to intercept each other. Then swarms of drones will battle it out in the sky fully autonomously.
Would this not be preferable to 20 year old kids crawling in the mud?
For all the moralising I am sure most of us would prefer AIs battling it out to enlisting.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that in those systems a human chose the target. Here, an AI does. > but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model Based on?
The stats of USA using human-guided drones to kill people. A civilian/military ratio and numbers was worse that 11.9. Heck, check the American drone war crime video Wikileaks published. The one that made the USA so angry that it decided to attack and destroy the journalists.
I am amused about how emotional people get about AI killing people. In my mind the idea that someone sitting at a screen chosing to blow up other humans is frankly far more terrifying.
A computer is unlikely to go "colonel Kurtz".
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the difference between a targeting a specific piece of military hardware compared to training an AI model to target humans and infrastructure is quite different. This explains why drones that get misdirected will target oil infrastructure in friendly countries.
Agreed. Even some of the latest IR missiles (AIM-9X I believe) also include a visual seeking component to compliment the IR seeker, and try to identify aircraft types based on their outlines (presumably for orienting the missile for maximum damage). You just can't make that distinction with people, especially not if just using IR or the likes. The guy with a rifle slung over his shoulder just happens to look like the…
The US has made it very clear that they're going to be targeting Iranian water infrastructure. Israel have flattened most of the hospitals in Gaza along with the university. They just don't care about not targeting civilians any more.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#196I wonder what that means for war crimes responsibility. Let's say a swarm of these things kills every civilian patient in a hospital or every child in a school. Who is responsible? I'm surprised Israel wasn't the first to field such weapons.
Imagine sanctions killing a million civilians due to insufficient medical care. Imagine firebombing Tokyo. Imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians. Imagine genociding Palestinians. Imagine bombing a girl's school, killing hundreds. Who's responsible, AI or a human? That misses the point that noone seems to be responsible at all, even in democracies.
We all know who is responsible, but you are right.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#197That is not true. By my calculation the first human killed by drones was probably September 24, 1958 when planes were shot down by fully autonomous rocket powered kamikaze drones released over the taiwan strait. My point being A. we have been killing people with fully autonomous drones for a long time now. and B. why the name change? just because it uses a propeller or is in vertical helicopter form does it is not a…
You need to show at least some reference to that, or a name I can look up..
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happen to Bucha and Mariupol? Why did they get wiped off the map? Was it a tsunami?
Do you believe that the majority of inhabitants even of Mariupol have been killed, tortured or enslaved? If so, could you point me to a source for that? Wikipedia reports its population has dropped from about 425K to an estimated 120K, but reports an estimate that 200K people fled; they report a high-end estimate of 25K people killed during the 2022 siege itself.
What happened to 105K people even using your numbers?
Why is the satellite imagery just huge piles of rubble?
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal". Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be…
But don't you think Greece, if nothing else, emphasizes that a country isn't defined by whoever happens to declare it as part of their borders, but the people within those borders? Greece persisted for millennia, even when there was no Greece. The state disappeared but the people persisted. I'm not at all a pacifist but there is no country I would fight, let alone die, for. Because when we say that we're really speak…
>> But don't you think Greece, if nothing else, emphasizes that a country isn't defined by whoever happens to declare it as part of their borders, but the people within those borders? Greece persisted for millennia, even when there was no Greece. The state disappeared but the people persisted.
Yes, I have considered this argument and it rings true to me. On the other hand, it is worth considering that there are no Greeks left in the coast of Asia Minor, any more, a land that Greeks occupied since the time of Homer. The same goes for the coast of the Black Sea, occupied by the Pontic Greeks. Like the Armenians, the Capaddocian christians, and the Assyrian Christians, Greeks were ethnically cleansed or genocided, depending on your point of view [1], by the nascent Turkish state in the 1920's.
I should point out that the event that triggered the ethnic cleansing was a nationalistic, irredentist spasm that sent the Greek army invading Asia Minor to "liberate" it. I'm guessing that the Turkish would have slaughtered the Asia Minor Greeks anyway, like they did everyone else who wasn't a) muslim or b) Turkish speaking, but in the eventuality, it was the Greeks who started it.
As my footnote notes, we call the events of 1922 "The Catastrophe". The Greeks are one of three Mediterranean peoples who have a word that means "disaster", that is used for a specific disaster so that when this word is spoken everyone knows which disaster it means: the Jews have the Shoah, the Palestinians the Nakba. And just like the Jews, the Greeks lost the land our ancestors occupied for thousands of years, we lost our greatest city, Constantinople, and we lost our greatest temple, the Aghia Sophia, which was turned to a mosque.
I cannot in any good faith be a pacifist without acknowledging this bloody history that has threatened to wipe out my people, and expelled them from their land; and not just my own people. Nations are nasty things and they are not, I fear, just jurisdictions. Nations are people. People kill other people because they don't belong to the same nations; not abstract, faceless nations.
If I were to be a pacifist without recognising the fact that the very existence of my people may one day be at risk, what kind of pacifist would I be? An idiot, or a suicidal pacifist, I reckon.
So I'm a pacifist with limits. Kind of like a bounded pacifism, if you like.
But, if it came to that, I would give my life for peace as much as I would give my life for my people.
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[1] Wikipedia calls it the "Greek genocide" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide). At school we learned it was ethnic cleansing. We commonly refer to it as Η Καταστροφή. The Catastrophe.
Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine. not the parent, but i have a guess. they mention the variety of weapons because some weapons are abhorrent. designed to be maximally painful, for the maximum amount of time, purely to bring about maximum suffering. "every weapon at your disposal" includes those weapons. and that is really difficult to…
Using every weapon at your disposal would entail, at the extreme end, unleashing weapons which could viably kill every person on this planet - to defend a state. It's not exactly a typical foundation for pacifism.
Well, if it helps, I'm a Computer Scientist so I can't think of how to destroy the entire world with "every weapon at my disposal". I reckon at most I could make a more lethal drone swarm.
EDIT: Oh, I should clarify, that's where all this stuff about pacifism comes from. I did some research on autonomous AI for robotics during a post-doc and that made me think more carefully about somewhat extreme situations that would hopefully never arise, and how I would react to them. I mean I was already thinking that way but the hands-on experience and real, if distant, possibility of my work being used in ways I would never want it to be, helped solidify those earlier thoughts into a more coherent form.
I'm saying because given my username you might legitimately wonder whether I would actually ever be in the position of taking up arms, like actual weapons, to fight for my country. Probably not. But programming or piloting drones is absolutely not out of the question, as a thing I'm qualified to do. So I had to think about whether I'd do it, and under what circumstances.
I'm also a signatory of the Lethal Autonomous Weapons Pledge which I signed during my PhD:
https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/lethal-autonomous-weapo...