The Pentagon is moving toward letting AI weapons autonomously decide to kill humans

I would argue happiness is profitable, but would have to shared amongst the people. Killer robots are profitable for a concentrated group of people

Oh no, we figured it out, but killer robots are profitable while happiness survival is not.

Boomers have been in power for a long long time and the technology we are debating is as a result of their investment and prioritisation. So am not sure they are very afraid of it.

I hope so, but I was born with an extremely good sense of trajectory and I also know how to use nets. So lets just hope I'm superhuman and the only one who possesses these powers.

Edit; I'm being a little extreme here because I heavily disagree with the way everything in this world is being run. So I'm giving a little push back on this subject that I'm wholly against. I do have a lot of manufacturing experience, and I would hope any killer robots governments produce would be extremely shielded against EMPs, but that is not my field, and I have no idea if shielding a remote controlled robot from EMPs is even possible?

Your comment got me curious about what would be the easiest way to make a homemade emp. Business Insider of all things has got us all covered, even if that business may be antithetical to business insiders pro capitalistic agenda.

Yeah very easy ways, one of the most common ways to cheat a slot machine is with a localized emp device to convince the machine you're adding tokens.

Is there a way to create an EMP without a nuclear weapon?

There are several other ways, yes.

One way involves replacing the flash with an antenna on an old camera flash. It's not strong enough to fry electronics, but your phone might need anything from a reboot to a factory reset to servicing if it's in range when that goes off.

I think the difficulty for EMPs comes from the device itself being an electronic, so the more effective the pulse it can give, the more likely it will fry its own circuits. Though if you know the target device well, you can target the frequencies it is vulnerable to, which could be easier on your own device, plus everything else in range that don't resonate on the same frequencies as the target.

Tesla apparently built (designed?) a device that could fry a whole city with a massive lighting strike using just 6 transmitters located in various locations on the planet. If that's true, I think it means it's possible to create an EMP stronger than a nuke's that doesn't have to destroy itself in the process, but it would be a massive infrastructure project spanning multiple countries. There was speculation that massive antenna arrays (like HAARP) might be able to accomplish similar from a single location, but that came out of the conspiracy theory side of the world, so take that with a grain of salt (and apply that to the original Tesla invention also).

There's an explosively pumped flux compression generator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator

“You have 20 seconds to reply…”

Goes to original ticket:

Status: WONTFIX

"This is working as intended according to specifications."

Nah, too straightforward for a real employee. Also, they would be talking to a phone robot instead that will mever let them talk to a real person.

My problem is, due to systemic pressure, how under-trained and overworked could these people be? Under what time constraints will they be working? What will the oversight be? Sounds ripe for said slippery slope in practice.

"Ok Dall-3, now which of these is a threat to national security and U.S interests?" 🤔

Sleep-deprived 20 year olds calling shots is very much normal in any army. They of course have rules of engagement, but other than that, they're free to make their own decisions - whether an autonomous robot is involved or not.

How many people are you going to hold accountable if something was made by a team of ten people? Of a hundred people? Do you want to include everyone from designer to a QA?

Accountability should be reasonable, the ones who make decisions should be held accountable, companies at large should be held accountable, but making every last developer accountable is just a dream of a world where you do everything correctly and so nothing needs fixing. This is impossible in the real world, don't know if it's good or bad.

And from my experience when there's too much responsibility people tend to either ignore that and get crushed if anything goes wrong, or to don't get close to it or sabotage any work not to get anything working. Either way it will not get the results you may expect from holding everyone accountable

But that is during training. I insinuated that you can't punish AI for making a mistake, when used in combat situations, which is very convenient for the ones intentionally wanting that mistake to happen

Sorry, but this is not a valid comparison. What we're talking about here, is having a gun with AI built in, that decides if it should pull the trigger or not. With a regular gun you always have a human press the trigger. Now imagine an AI gun, that you point at someone and the AI decides if it should fire or not. Who do you account the death to at this case?

Right? :)

Well, an important point you and him. Both forget to mention is that mines are considered inhumane. Perhaps that means AI murdering should also be considered. Inhumane, and we should just not do it instead of allowing landmines.

Imagine a mine that could move around, target seek, refuel, rearm, and kill hundreds of people without human intervention.

Pretty sure the entire DOD got a collective boner reading this.

Imagine a mine that could move around, target seek, refuel, rearm, and kill hundreds of people without human intervention. Comparing an autonomous murder machine to a mine is like comparing a flint lock pistol to the fucking gattling cannon in an a10.

For what it's worth, there's footage on youtube of drone swarm demonstrations that were posted 6 years ago. Considering that the military doesn't typically release footage of the cutting edge of its tech to the public, so this demonstration was likely for a product that was already going obsolete; and that the 6 years that have passed since have made lightning fast developments in things like facial recognition... at this point I'd be surprised if we weren't already at the very least field testing the murder machines you described.

Imagine a mine that could recognize "that's just a child/civilian/medic stepping on me, I'm going to save myself for an enemy soldier." Or a mine that could recognize "ah, CenCom just announced a ceasefire, I'm going to take a little nap." Or "the enemy soldier that just stepped on me is unarmed and frantically calling out that he's surrendered, I'll let this one go through. Not the barrier troops chasing him, though."

There's opportunities for good here.

Or just, you know, have a moral compass in general.

It will go haywire in areas for sure.

Ciws has had an autonomous mode for years and it still has an issue with locking on commercial planes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/13kk5au/phalanx_ciws_detecting_a_passenger_plane_going/

Fuck that bungie jumper in particular!

So it's going to run for office?

You're right. They also hid under a cardboard box.

Every warning in pop culture is being misinterpreted as something other than a fun/scary movie designed to sell tickets, being imagined as a scholarly attempt at projecting a plausible outcome instead.

something something torment nexus

Similarly, if you can dodge a shoe, you can dodge war crimes tribunals.

Even the best laid plans go awry though. The point is even if they pragmatically design it to not kill indiscriminately, bugs and glitches happen. The technology isn't all the way there yet and putting the ability to kill in the machine body of something that cannot understand context is a terrible idea. It's not that the military wants to indiscriminately kill everything, it's that they can't possibly plan for problems in the code they haven't encountered yet.

If entire wars could be fought by proxy with robots instead of humans, would that be better (or less bad) than the way wars are currently fought? I feel like it might be.

Yes there is that's the very definition of the word.

It means that the failure condition is a safe condition. Like fire doors that unlock in the event of a power failure, you need electrical power to keep them in the locked position their default position is unlocked even if they spend virtually no time in their default position. The default position of an elevator is stationery and locked in place, if you cut all the cables it won't fall it'll just stay still until rescue arrives.

I mean in industrial automation we take about safety rating. It isn't that rare when I put together a system that would require two 1-in-million events that are independent of each other to happen at the same time. That's pretty good but I don't know how to translate that to AI.

Woops. Two guys left. Naa that's enough to repopulate earth

My point being that there would be more motivation to filter Derek Chauvin type of cops from the AI library than a soldier with a trigger finger.

Civilians? Never heard of 'em!

I think you’re forgetting a very important third category of people…

I'm sorry, I can't get past the "autonomous AI weapons killing humans part"

That's fucking terrifying.

And that's how you garauntee conflict for generations to come!

That doesn't seem to have stopped anyone.

Metalhead.

Don't forget the follow up, The Sarah Connor's Chronicles. An amazing sequel to a nice documentary.

yes, that was it. Quite shocking to watch. I think that these things will be very real in maybe ten years. I'm quite afraid of it.

The link was missing a slash: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N38023R/

This is typically how stories like this go. Like most animals, humans have evolved to pay extra attention to things that are scary and give inordinate weight to scenarios that present danger when making decisions. So you can present someone with a hundred studies about how AI really behaves, but if they've seen the Terminator that's what sticks in their mind.