Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#41

Post by int_19h »

narrator wrote: post #18

It's like WWI all over again. In WWI, people went happily off to war thinking it's going to be nice and heroic and adventurous like the good old days and they all get slaughtered in a pathetic pointless way in a blink of an eye by newly developed automated war machinery. The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call. The part in sci-fi where anyone actually has to aim to kill an enemy was a big romantic…

You don't even need robots for that. You just need an advanced scope on a rifle that can still be transported by a human, and the human is also the one that identifies targets. Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0oGZ4TZr5k

Now, we're not yet at the point where it's cost-effective to give every infantryman a thing like this - the scope alone costs more than most high-end sniper rifles. But costs will go down...

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#42

Post by l0b0 »

Just the availability of this kind of tech would scare anybody sane shitless. From that day, you'd better hope you don't ever piss off anybody within a 1000 km radius enough to find your photo and address online (easy in most countries) and drive to within drone distance of your house. Want to obliterate anyone's family completely? Done. Kill anyone in session at the government of a country - any country? Done.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#43

Post by int_19h »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30

I for real find it terrifying. If we were sane, we'd be pushing for international treaties against this same as chemical weapons, instead we're making it happen and selling the tech to people.

International treaties around weapons are hard to enact lately - it seems that most of the useful stuff that we have is mostly created in WW1-WW2 era. For more recent treaties, the usual pattern is that one is enacted, but US, Russia and China (and sometimes a few others who happen to be major users) simply refuse to be a party. Most other countries sign up, but it mostly doesn't matter, because they either don't do it on a large scale anyway for other reasons, or they ignore it when it's suddenly convenient. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munition...

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#44

Post by anonymous5133 »

l0b0 wrote: post #42

Just the availability of this kind of tech would scare anybody sane shitless. From that day, you'd better hope you don't ever piss off anybody within a 1000 km radius enough to find your photo and address online (easy in most countries) and drive to within drone distance of your house. Want to obliterate anyone's family completely? Done. Kill anyone in session at the government of a country - any country? Done.

That technology already exists and is being tested in a military setting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAk5gRD-t0. Not sure if those ones have explosive on it but I'm sure it isn't harder to implement it.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#46

Post by sorokod »

hitekker wrote: post #14

Terrifying and fascinating, as all good wake-up calls should be. In the future, miniature exploding drones could indeed autonomously, distinguish between cranium and body, plot a flight route and divebomb at their victim. But, I don't think these skull-crackers will be fully autonomous, even with significant advances and development. Given the chance of collateral damage and the "fuzziness" of algorithms, the kill co…

What makes a positive "false" is not necessarily objective. It may be fluid and entirely dependent on the "mission parameters". Consider two states at war where the bots are by design targeting a specific genetic fenotype.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#47

Post by Jach »

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.

I think the proposed ban is: don't develop weapons with software that can make the killing decisions without humans in the loop. That itself isn't so impossible a ban to make something like the CWC out of, but nations couldn't even stop 3D gun printing, despite the same sort of worries.

Additionally, even with that ban, you could have the exact same video with the minor difference that each drone sends its video stream to a human somewhere else who presses a button to authorize each suggested-by-the-drone kill. And if we got that far, the pressure to get rid of the ban would be immense, because tool AIs are better as agent AIs.

And if we can't even handle regular old microsystems technology, how are we going to handle nanotech? https://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-... (and briefly covered in this talk by the same author http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANPyybo-dA) discusses it but in the 11 years since it was published I see no reason to think the world is any better prepared.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#48

Post by sorokod »

daxorid wrote: post #7
basicplus2 wrote: post #2

I find it Strange that nobody generally comments on this including all the previous postings.. is it because people think it is inevitable and there is nothing they can do to stop it? or is it because people think it is fantasy and could never happen?

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.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#49

Post by danieltillett »

narrator wrote: post #18

It's like WWI all over again. In WWI, people went happily off to war thinking it's going to be nice and heroic and adventurous like the good old days and they all get slaughtered in a pathetic pointless way in a blink of an eye by newly developed automated war machinery. The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call. The part in sci-fi where anyone actually has to aim to kill an enemy was a big romantic…

The most amazing thing about the Great War is not that people started out like this, but they continued once they knew the truth.

We are very unlikely to get as wakeup call after any AI War because we will all be dead.

Re: Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

#50

Post by tomjen3 »

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.

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.
Post reply on HN