> a predator imaging drone telling a human
> operator falsely that the current image
> is a terrorist?
Are we going to have hearings auditing what the algorithm is like? is there going to be a scandal because isBrownPerson() is discovered in there somewhere? Is someone going to run it against a video collection of regular daily life and discover the drones would be indiscriminately bombing innocent situations if given the chance?
The end result is that we're going to have to effectively have to come up with rules of engagement for every scenario. I think this will lead to war being fought more justly and with less collateral damage than ever before.
Thinking we can wage wars without risk to ourselves or our "soldiers" is preposterous.
"Just" wars are a ridiculous idea rooted in superstition and hubris.
> drones justify terrorism because it's the only available
> response to fighters from the "other side".
More generally people resort to terrorism in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The west could relatively easily win the wars they're fighting now in the middle-east with their WWI armies if they were willing to care less about civilian casualties, that's how lopsided the odds are.
> Thinking we can wage wars without risk to ourselves or our
> "soldiers" is preposterous.
2. People will not come up with "responsible" rules of engagement as you seem to suggest. isBrownPerson() will be coded into the algorithm but not in a discernible way. Sure, you could verify this against a video collection: like we all know the statistics of profiling and incarceration rates for different races.
If that seems extreme, consider the self-driving car problem. 30,000 people in the US alone are killed per year in car accidents involving human drivers. What is the acceptable number of motor vehicle related deaths per year when all cars are self-driving?
Obviously because those humans then share and bear the moral dilemma of doing it or not. Which also affects the outcome, as opposed to just being some inconsequential detail. Humans can demand out of an injust war (as they've done time and again). Killing machines can not.
It's the difference between blindly following orders (which not even all Nazi's did) and being able to have a change of heart.
It's also the sheer (number of magnitudes) more killing efficiency of the killing algorithms, when a machine could kill 10000 people in the time it takes for a single human to make a decision about 1 of them -- until we find there's a != when we needed == in the algorithm.
> 30,000 people in the US alone are killed per year in car
> accidents involving human drivers. What is the acceptable number
> of motor vehicle related deaths per year when all cars are
> self-driving?
What we won't have would be Vasili Arkhipovs, Oskar Schindlers and Chris Taylors...
This is an odd statement. In my reading of historical battles, I've never seen a mention of the idea that soldiers before 1950 did not shoot to kill when ordered to.
However, the original statistic is apparently from a not so credible source, a study by SLA Marshall in WWII that's not so well regarded. This thread goes into some depth:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_t...
Not sure what the truth of it is.
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/crime/2015/10/19/po...
An old thread on the topic:
Including many variations of that same problem. "Sorry, you don't qualify for ____ because our 'clever' assessment algorithm doesn't account for your particular situation." Humans with decision making power correct these kind of problems all the time.
Computers with clever algorithms can be incredibly useful, but they are still just tools. Unfortunately, given how bad we humans are with statistics, it's easy to overestimate[1] their accuracy.
In addition to the raw accuracy problems, there is a risk of prejudices being baked into algorithms. We already see this with "redlining" and other housing practices, where loans availability ends up being coded racism. With the added complexity of machine learning and other prediction and analysis methods, it is probably a lot easier to hide improper discrimination.
[1] reason #57 why statistics should be a mandatory HS math class, right after algebra
While I agree that humans may enshrine their prejudices in code which will later will turn hard to adjust, again what I fear more is a reverse scenario. A machine can be perfectly fair and people won't like it, because it fails to apply the biases they want. People often apply counter-discrimination to compensate for what they believe is unfair treatment.
A mandatory class in statistics and applied probability theory could maybe help the next generation to accept that what is fair may not look so at a first glance.
To be honest, I don't think this will help much since most people won't interested in it and will forget what they learn as soon as the class is over. Also, being an expert in statistics can help you better understand reality, or it can help you present data in a way that confirms your biases (even unintentionally). It's sort of like sophistry, except not quite to that degree or moral ambivalence.
edit: If you want a good example of this, see Scott Alexander show how parapsychology can actually come up with some pretty good statistics while appearing to check off all the right boxes with regard to experimental design: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/to-the-point/can-big-...
A small flying drone operating an 9mm pistol has extremely poor accuracy. Especially with multiple shots. If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target. Currently regular guy with little training and a rifle can probably shoot down a gun wielding drone most of the time before the opposite can happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqHrTtvFFIs
Then there are drones with bombs attached to them. One of the most sophisticated is called Hellfire missile. But it's needlessly big and expensive. The quad copter in next video costs 100$ and has payload to carry regular hand grenade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2Tpp3CIoY
You could go RC car route. But you again need a bit of size to conquer stairs. Also it's easier to track where it comes & goes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXRMDK3r7s
I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty. Autonomous flight, GPS navigation, address from google maps and bit of facial recognition. First civilian drone murder is just matter of time. People kill with more ease the further they can be when it's done.
I'm guessing this internet privacy thing will seem like child's play when all of sudden everybody wants to hide their physical address. Once that is handled, it's only bit like having rabid dogs with homing device.
The MSF Trauma Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan (3rd October) didn't have this luxury and in the fog of war, [0] 12 MSF medical staff and ten patients were killed. [1],[2]
Killing by remote sensing, is indiscriminate. Adding AI is another order of stupidity.
References:
[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-te...
[1] http://www.msf.org.uk/article/in-memoriam-msf-colleagues-kil...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-witho...
True, read the Ars article: "The BMC crew is responsible for steering the aircraft to targets, identifying them, and shooting them; the aircraft's battery is slaved to the sensor suite for targeting." - Aircrew, well trained, professional. As ethical as you can get.
Now what happened is "A US special operations team on the ground, given coordinates of the Afghani NDS building by the Afghan forces they were working with, passed them to the AC-130. But when the AC-130 crew punched the grid coordinates into their targeting system, it aimed at an open field 300 meters away from the actual target. Working from a rough description of the building provided from the ground, the sensor operators found a building close to the field that they believed was the target. Tragically, it was actually the hospital."
Will adding AI to this situation make any improvement when the real issue is ' lack of a "common operating picture,"'?
This sort of thing: https://youtu.be/DTqa-NEwUbs?t=94
It could even drop "phone home" over radio, allow the operators to point out the targets at that point, and then fire.
But governments could greatly increase their capability for surveillance.
> Adding AI is another order
> of stupidity.
Boeing is developing compact portable laser weapons technology that could conceivably be mounted on drones.
http://www.livescience.com/52121-laser-weapon-destroys-test-...
If you look past the hype, lasers are far from ready.
Another scenario that is less likely but still more likely than killer robots would be AI that simply loses interest in human affairs, stops interacting with us, and does its own thing-- like depicted in the movie "Her" !
Politics, moral only exist because there a large quantity of human.
Snowden like episodes have shown us that we should not trust our government. The government does blatantly illegal things, lies when confronted and in many cases kills or jails our own citizens just because they are exposing the government. I am more scared of government using this AI to oppress its own people.
Imagine this, a person who is 18 years today becomes a potential presidential candidate or major activist in future. Some clerk at DC would simply run a computer program that will bring up the fact that this guy sent a sext to his 17 year old girlfriend in past, smoked weed when 19, bought beer when he was 20 etc. Such government would them implicate him in various court cases and jail him or even worse simply blackmail him to shut up.
Well we work on global warming even though the worst effects are likely decades off. I think one computer science professor put it something like this: "If experts told us aliens were likely arriving on Earth in 50 or 100 years, it'd make sense to start preparing now." You don't want to wait until it's too late to do whatever needs to be done.
Though that stuff isn't nice it's probably an improvement on previous technologies - looking out of the bomber and thinking that looks like some good buildings to bomb and similar.
Your food shopping point still needs middlemen. You have "chain of trust" issues with the producers. How do you know that you'll get good oranges from the orange grove. Who capitalizes the distribution system and designs the business model.
Considering historical examples, we'll see more use for people in the economic problems that are still machine hard. Machine easy economic problems will converge to resource costs + any premium for monopoly. This will free up more demand for other products. People still want to buy an easier, better life.
First off, we'll never let such an AI to be completely objective, because, well, the paperclip scenario. And second, the AI will be about as "objective" as Google search is - in other words, not really. At the end of the day it's still humans that decide the algorithms for Google search, and it will be humans that decide the algorithms for the "smarter than human" AI.
It's not a close risk comparison. The world is far less dangerous today than it has ever been, that includes both terrorism and war. AI and autonomous weapons systems are not going to suddenly make the developed countries that deploy those weapons want to slaughter each other.
How many people die from medical mistakes per year in the US? More than died in all wars and all acts of terrorism combined globally in 2015. The AI that is no doubt going to show up throughout healthcare over the coming 30 or 40 years, will probably improve on the rate of human mistakes - while it still kills tens of thousands per year through mistakes in just the US.
While the military can get away with remote action it won't happen with police in Democratic countries except possibly with non lethal force. I could see remote shut down of cars, even a flash bang or sonic system.
The real danger from AI isn't it taking over, it is from too many people checking out and not participating in life anymore
What you should be fearing is military drones being given the ability to make decisions on targets or to fire, even with human assistance, and these systems won't just reside in the hands of large governments either.
Already police and militaries around the world are using abstracted forms of force, wherein target are identified with algorithms, and then force trained on those targets
What's do you think is going to happen first, SkyNet, or a predator imaging drone telling a human operator falsely that the current image is a terrorist?
What's going to happen first? SkyNet, or self driving cars putting millions of people out of jobs because of a lack of demand for drivers in transportation, or manufacture of cars? (I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it will be very very disruptive)
If SkyNet is a threat, it's 50 or 100 years off I think. "AI" as it is now, is no where near the capability people are talking about. It's sheer hyperbole.