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.
Most military networks are closed circuit by design. I’m not sure how this could be implemented without also allowing back doors to be exploited. You wouldn’t want someone to be able to turn off your defenses as they begin an attack, for example.
There are a number of ways to do it. You can transmit a one-time code to the device that you set up right beforehand. No one’s going to be able to guess your 1024 character one-time password.
You can even protect the password entry program itself with port knocking. If the right ports aren’t accessed in the right sequence, the enemy doesn’t even get a chance to try their passwords.
Every server is on the Internet 99.999% of the time. They are constantly being tested. The right cybersecurity tools are available now.
I’m sure (or at least I hope) nuclear weapons have similar systems in place so that they can be launched or shut off as needed?
In what ways would this be different
Yeah, they don’t. Nuclear systems are for the most part closed sourced and built on DOS level hardware. Most of that shit can’t connect to the internet even if they wanted it to. The system you’re thinking about is radio waves between people talking.
Maybe can we take a step back and ask whether we need thousands of AI defense bots at all? Or are we past that point?
I don’t like it but I think we do. China and Russia will certainly have them and they will get ten times better in a same amount of years.
I watched the Ted talk on defense drivers. Scary shit. Thing is I work with commercial cameras and have, in hand, camera that can not only identify all kinds of objects such a human’s, they can recognize individual humans and put a name to them. They can recognize if people are loitering or if someone is being followed. They can reconsider a car from a truck from a bus from a bike. This is not done in a server but thru the power of the CPU in the camera alone. The cost. 500 dollars.
Point being the power available in such a low cost item is staggering. Combined with a weapons platform and it is scary. A terrorist group could distribute hundreds into bushes and they could just sit there for a week in low power mode, waiting to recognize a simple person and spring into action. This is stuff we have right now off the shelf.
What will be part of military arsenals in ten years will eclipse this current tech significantly. Troops won’t be ambushed by live human fire but by thousands of drones that care not for their survival.
Can I get a few of those cameras and have them record any people around my house that aren’t me? What are they called?
Hikvision line mainly if you want the low cost ones.
They won’t do a ‘not me’ identification. Mainly because it can only identify you or any person if they get a decent view of you. Basically the first event will be ‘i see a human’ and if you look at the camera then it can also do an event and say basically ‘Jack black’ is here. It is two different kind of events you need to turn on. But the person recognition can only fire if it recognizes you.
I thought the same thing is you in that I could have it ignore known people. But it like you looking out a window. You see someone from a distance. To recognize them you need them to come closer. Thus as a person you don’t call the cops or create an event immediately but at some point you might. The cameras are not quite that smart yet but as said, ten years?
What I think is dangerous is terrorists or mass killers getting dozens or hundreds of small drones and installing explosives on them. Install these cameras and CPUs you mentioned that can recognize human faces and have them fly into someone’s face and then explode.
You could kill many people and unless we start installing AA turrets all over our populated cities, there seems to be little we can do to stop it.
Autonomous drones made by China have been used in Papua New Guinea to bomb at least one village so I think the US is actually behind the curve in terms of the AI arms race.
This is one of those classical sci-fi apocalypse ideas, where humans make autonomous war machines they can’t turn off, and the machines outlive the humans and continue the war for them.
Sounds like the beginnings of the plot to Horizon Dawn. Can’t have it both ways, either it’s a secure closed system with no way to stop it if it goes rogue or it has safety’s built in but then those could be exploited.
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.
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.
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.
