‘Killer robots’ are becoming a real threat in Africa.
Africa’s Sahel region is engulfed by violence, and now there are fears that the conflict could take another bloody turn.
Why this soft-spoken tone?
Killer robots must be banned, period.
Whoever bans them will be at a disadvantage militarily. They will never be banned for this one reason alone.
I think you're conflating a ban to include banning their production (not an unreasonable assumption). As we've seen with nukes, however, possession of a banned weapon is sometimes as good as using it.
I'm guessing the major countries will ban them, but still develop the technology, let other countries start using it, then say "well everyone else is using it so now we have to as well". Just like we're seeing with mini drones in Ukraine. The US is officially against automated attacks, but we're supporting a country using them, and we're developing full automation for our own aircraft.
Once combat AI exceeds humans:
A ban to all war, globally. Those that violate the ban will have autonomous soldier deployed on their soil.
This is the only way it will work, no other path leads to a world without autonomous warbots. We can ban them all we want but there will be some terrorist cell with access to arduinos that can do the same in a garage. And China will never follow such a ban
Ban the state first. Every state. These wacko cultists are literally destroying the planet so they can control people with killer robots.
I mean, most complex weapons systems have been some level of robot for quite a while. Aircraft are fly-by-wire, you have cruise missiles, CIWS systems operating in autonomous mode pick out targets, ships navigate, etc.
I don't expect that that genie will ever go back in the bottle. To do it, you'd need an arms control treaty, and there'd be a number of problems with that:
I'd also add that I'm not especially concerned about autonomy specifically in weapons systems.
It sounds like your concern, based on your follow-up comment, is that something like Skynet might show up -- the computer network in the Terminator movie series that turn on humans. The kind of capability you're dealing with isn't on that level. I can imagine one day, general AI being an issue in that role -- though I'm not sure that it's the main concern I'd have, would guess that dependence and then an unexpected failure might be a larger issue. But in any event, I don't think that it has much to do with military issues -- I mean, in a scenario where you truly had an uncontrolled, more-intelligent-than-humans artificial intelligence running amok on something like the Internet, it isn't going to matter much whether-or-not you've plugged it into weapons, because anything that can realistically fight humanity can probably manage to get control of or produce weapons anyway. Like, this is an issue with the development of advanced artificial intelligence, but it's not really a weapons or military issue. If we succeed in building something more-intelligent than we are, then we will fundamentally face the problem of controlling it and making something smarter than us do what we want, which is kind of a complicated problem.
The term coined by Yudkowsky for this problem is "friendly AI":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence
Friendly artificial intelligence (also friendly AI or FAI) is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests or contribute to fostering the improvement of the human species. It is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence and is closely related to machine ethics. While machine ethics is concerned with how an artificially intelligent agent should behave, friendly artificial intelligence research is focused on how to practically bring about this behavior and ensuring it is adequately constrained.
It's not an easy problem, and I think that it's worth discussion. I just think that it's mostly unrelated to the matter of making weapons autonomous.
Reward models (aka reinforcement learning) and preference optimization models can come to some conclusions that we humans find very strange when they learn from patterns in the data they’re trained on. Especially when those incentives and preferences are evaluated (or generated) by other models. Some of these models could very well could come to the conclusion that nuking every advanced-tech human civilization is the optimal way to improve the human species because we have such rampant racism, classism, nationalism, and every other schism that perpetuates us treating each other as enemies to be destroyed and exploited.
Sure, we will build ethical guard rails. And we will proclaim to have human-in-the-loop decision agents, but we’re building towards autonomy and edge/corner-cases always exist in any framework you constrain a system to.
I’m an AI Engineer working in autonomous agentic systems—these are things we (as an industry) are talking about—but to be quite frank, there are not robust solutions to this yet. There may never be. Think about raising a teenager—one that is driven strictly by logic, probabilistic optimization, and outcome incentive optimization.
It’s a tough problem. The naive-trivial solution that’s also impossible is to simply halt and ban all AI development. Turing opened Pandora’s box before any of our time.
I don't expect that that genie will ever go back in the bottle. To do it, you'd need an arms control treaty, and there'd be a number of problems with that:
The worst problem of arms control treaties is that Usa never adheres to one.
Ok so we ban them, and some incel terminally online hacker on steroids turns 20 arduinos into bombs.
I agree killer robots are dangerous and ethically problematic, just I don't think banning them will keep asshats from making them, including on large scale.
China could pump them out by the billions and we'd probably not know till they were deployed.
For you as well: https://lemmy.world/comment/11728594
The US is conducting live AI experiments on the people of the Global South and exposing some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to dangerous technology it won't use on it's own citizens.
I'm actually surprised it has taken this long.
What surprises me even more is that organized crime hasn't gotten on board much (yet). Like, screw drive by shootings -- drone dropped grenades on rival gangs and such.
Or that drones haven't been used for "school shooting" type mass casualty attacks.
Or that foreign countries haven't snuck in with a sea can full of drones which fan out and attack infrastructure.
Imagine a cruise missile as a drone carrier that just scatters anti-personnel drones along a flight path, each just finding a person indiscriminately.
If there's anything that Ukraine is teaching us, it's that we don't have countermeasures (yet). The autonomous versions are even scarier.
We do have countermeasures, however many countries mothballed them because we thought them obsolete.
The Gepard which has been proven to be invaluable in a close range AA role, is being pulled from scrapyards. Yes, the radar resolution has to be increased to effectively track small single use drones, but the technology is there.
The state is incredibly far ahead of any individual mass murderer.
For example there have been endless "school shootings" using advanced tech. We just call it "the war in gaza" or whatnot. freepalestine
There are also a number of ethical concerns associated with autonomous weapons.
That being five sentences after the sentence
There are worries that these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorist groups if their deployment in Africa is scaled up.
I'm worried that the facebooks and elons out there will build private armies of these, not even the terrorists.
That seems to imply that Facebook and Elon are not terrorists. I could make a reasonable argument for Facebook. Elon, I think, has already established his credentials with multiple acts that have led to riots and other violence.
Tuareg nationalists and even Islamic groups in Sahel are not terrorists. UN member states they are fighting against are. That would include France, Russia and who not.
So no, more egalitarian weapon technologies are a good thing. Not ethical concern for sure. If they don't have ethical concerns over jets and tanks.
Probably going to get on a list here...
Imagine how easy it would be to setup an even dozen drones in a pickup bed. Drive to a political rally, pop the bed cover, launch, drive away.
Feed the AI dozens of your target's images and let slip the dogs of war. Or, even lower tech, have someone controlling an overwatch drone and paint your target with a laser. The drones themselves could be cheap as hell, as long as they have a camera feed going back to, uh, some automagical targeting system. Maybe just point a cell phone at the target as if taking a picture?
Only defense I got is a powerful, wide-spectrum frequency jammer. No idea what the legalities look like for the government using them as defensive platforms. I doubt there are laws concerning such tactics.
Am I oversimplifying this? Devil and details and such? Comment and join me on the government's list!
Another thought on drone defense, maybe someone can comment. Why aren't the Russians and Ukrainians carrying 20-gauge anti-drone shotguns? A single-shot unit with a short barrel is super light and the very definition of reliabilty. Seems ideal given that you can tweak a shotgun load 1,000 different ways for spread, distance and weight.
Don't know the ideal combat range, but I've got 8 shotguns of various sorts and I can get any sort of load, anywhere I want. Playing at my range, it's fun to see what I get with different barrel lengths, chokes and charges. If you really want cheap, I've loaded homemade black powder and gravel. LOL, pretty crappy and messy, but it might do for a drone. Bonus! Now you've make a giant smokescreen!
For example, I've got an absolute POS single-shot 20 that weighs nothing, folds in half, never fails to fire and cost about $100. Even has a cheapo red-dot on it, point and click interface. Probably take a day of testing, and a shitload of varied ammo, to shape up an anti-drone weapon. And while we're at it, I have a 1920s single-shot 20 that would get the job done. Lightweight and you can snap the barrel on and off in seconds, 3 parts total.
You can even get fancy and make the choke adjustable by twisting. I have such a shotgun from the 1950s, nothing new here. Choke too tight and you missed? Now it's closer? Yank the choke off and go wide with it.
Training young soldiers should be easy enough. My neighbor's 22-yo wife is hell on wheels with her 20-gauge over-and-under. She's shooting skeet at twice the range I see Russians dying from.
So again, why not load the soldiers with such a rig? At least 1 man per squad?
I remember seeing this video a few years ago, and I'm really scared about drones technology, miniaturization and AI since... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
Oh! I'm getting right after that! We'll probably watch Alter all night now.
Ever seen Uncanny Valley?
Thank you! I have been showing this video to people for years and so far not a single other person has gotten how terrifying this is.
For whatever it's worth, everything they're about to do to you at Guantanamo is not who we are as a country.
Is this a copypasta?
I imagine by the time you see the tiny drone and are able to aim at it, it's likely too late. And what if it's a kamikaze drone and the explosion is bigger than anticipated?
Telling your soldiers to shoot at that sounds riskier than "take cover as soon as you think there's a drone".
Anyway my understanding is that so far drones are more useful for destroying stuff than killing people.
A much simpler countermeasure to armed drones is a net.
As for surveillance drones... I'm not sure militarily speaking they care all that much. The enemy already could be watching them with satellites, high altitude drones or balloons that would be nearly impossible to detect, or plain old binoculars, anyway.
Unless it's a covert operation, in which case the enemy launching a drone to find you is already very bad.
I have been screaming about this exact scenario for years now and I have not been able to get a single person to take it seriously. People leave such huge chunks of identity info online, it would be trivial to target someone with a detection package that could easily fit on a drone.
There's no real viable automatic defense options and for the life of me I feel it is only time before some rancid redneck terrorist does this.
The acronym "Laws" is a little too on the nose. I'd ask whether anyone involved in the development of these has seen the documentary film Robocop, but clearly they have and thought it was a great idea.
Terminator mbappe be like
Botswana