The Pentagon Is Accelerating AI and Autonomous Technology America’s military leaders are racing to deploy thousands of autonomous weapons and an AI-powered air monitoring system for Washington D.C.
There really would be no way to have an interface that shuts it down, that an AI wouldn’t be able to compromise. Though I imagine the military will set up a plan to blow up it’s connections to power and the internet should it go rouge.
People use the term AI too loosely. We don’t actually have artificial intelligence. We have neural networks that can perform tasks based on training data, but it’s not actually intelligent by any means. That said, fully autonomous systems have existed for decades already. Look up CIWS or CRAM.
I’m not going to get into a “no real Scottsman” arugement about the advancements in this field
Good lord. You’re talking about programs being smart enough to disable their own killswitch. That’s not a fucking thing.
Or how about not building them at all
It is not the world we live in unfortunately. Tell that you the Russians, to China or to some terrorist group with a few hundred thousand to spare.
I agree. It always has been an arms race and probably always will be. Humans are too aggressively murdery for our own good. I mean it served us well when we actually had real wild adversaries, but now it’s tearing our civilization and planet apart.
We still do have those real wild adversaries. Russia and China are only two that are of the conventional type.
The less obvious ones are the ones we don’t think about so much. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Argentinian at one time and so fourth. Most of these countries stay in line predominately because they now understand the likelihood of Western nation military involvement it they act too aggressive.
Point being if all Western nations backed out of the arms race right from the beginning. From WW2, I suspect WW3 would have happened long ago. One or more of those other countries would be far more active in one way or another. If we backed out now, it also would not be long before those same countries realize they could act without impunity. Nothing has really changed. Just the military damage potential is far more serious.
No. Such a thing would only be a good idea if you want the enemy to be able to turn your shit off when they please.
You’re thinking of ‘AI’, as something intelligent that can go rogue. Current and near future that’s just sci fi.
Military AI is already going rogue. It doesn’t need general intelligence to act unpredictably.
That’s called a bug - aka what it’s called when a program behaves unexpectedly and against design intentions.
That’s not going rogue, that’s doing what it was programmed to do.
By your standards you’d also have to consider WW2 acoustic homing torpedos as rogue AI because they might home in on the ship that fired them.
Edit:
A followup thought: the only real question is whether they can realistically test and refine these systems enough to trust them to carry out attacks autonomously without serious errors.vIm gonna guess no, but they’ll use them anyway.
Honestly that wasn’t even a bug, it was a perfect execution of the instructions it was given to perform its task with maximum efficiency and would have been incredibly easy to see in advance if anyone had spent 5 minutes thinking about it. Classic paperclip maximizer style literal interpretation of goals.
Your edit follows the point I was making. It doesn’t need to truly “go rogue” according to your definition, and it doesn’t need general intelligence to have the same disastrous outcome. We have examples of AI killing humans to accomplish the goal it is given, so we need to be damned sure that’s not going to happen in real life before deploying them over Washington DC.
They’ll just murder a bunch of people and then be turned off after having been shown to be ineffective too dangerous.
It’s not like AI is reliable at this point. Way too many people are actively ignoring experts pointing this fact out and instead obsessing over Skynet or w/e made up sci-fi BS.
Rather than be used for war, they’ll be used for threats of violence and propaganda. It’s not a new problem. It’s just a new version of that same problem.
Rather than be used for war, they’ll be used for threats of violence and propaganda
Surveillance is the word you’re looking for. Take all those NSA pipelines and run them through an AI and BAM, you’ve got your “terrorists”.
AI will be downfall of our technological society, but not because of killer robots and malevolent systems. It’s going to make everyone completely and utterly incompetent at everything in life.
It should be noted that individuals at the forefront of AI research have a direct bias against saying AI is dangerous. It’s their job, and saying anything which presents this research as dangerous could halt funding, and put them out of a job. It’s also their passion, though, so it’s an even bigger deal for them.
We have also seen individuals who have exited AI research calling for more regulation and ethics requirements. At the same time we are seeing AI ethics departments dismantled. These should stand out as red flags.
Autonomous drones are actively being used to bomb villages in Papua New Guinea. The idea that this kind of tech is “only going to be used for threats of violence and propaganda” is already outdated. It’s being used today, and the US just plans to also adopt the tech itself.
The department of defense was hacked just a few years ago, suck a button would have to have access to an internet. Meaning anyone could get to it and shut off the drones and such
