Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Dangerous Rise Of Military AI

X-47B stealth drone 


Autonomous machines capable of deadly force are increasingly prevalent in modern warfare, despite numerous ethical concerns. Is there anything we can do to halt the advance of the killer robots? 

The video is stark. Two menacing men stand next to a white van in a field, holding remote controls. They open the van’s back doors, and the whining sound of quadcopter drones crescendos. They flip a switch, and the drones swarm out like bats from a cave. In a few seconds, we cut to a college classroom. The killer robots flood in through windows and vents. The students scream in terror, trapped inside, as the drones attack with deadly force. The lesson that the film, Slaughterbots, is trying to impart is clear: tiny killer robots are either here or a small technological advance away. Terrorists could easily deploy them. And existing defences are weak or nonexistent. 

Some military experts argued that Slaughterbots – which was made by the Future of Life Institute, an organisation researching existential threats to humanity – sensationalised a serious problem, stoking fear where calm reflection was required. But when it comes to the future of war, the line between science fiction and industrial fact is often blurry. The US air force has predicted a future in which “Swat teams will send mechanical insects equipped with video cameras to creep inside a building during a hostage standoff”. One “microsystems collaborative” has already released Octoroach, an “extremely small robot with a camera and radio transmitter that can cover up to 100 metres on the ground”. It is only one of many “biomimetic”, or nature-imitating, weapons that are on the horizon. 

Read more .... 

WNU Editor: The advantages of employing AI platforms on weapon systems makes it a guarantee that these systems are going to be developed and deployed. I have said it more than once on this blog. This is the future of warfare.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We need more AI otherwise there will not be intelligent life on Earth.


"If you were in a hospice and had already been given weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of a clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death."

- Dr. Ngozi Ezike

TBH Ezike might be quite intelligent. Her intelligence might be suppressed form taking order from a complete Shyster (D).

Anonymous said...

I predicted an attack on a major city using drone swarms about a year ago... it's cheap, easy to do, relatively safe for the attacker, and hard to defend against.. about 100k USD and you're in business.. 50 -100 drones, each easily under 1k a pop and the rest for the payloads... even if just a caustic agent were to be used, and not shrapnel bombs(you can get them to be under 100gram if you use a swarm and target a dense area, but you don't have to either.. drones from China at a 1k price can surely carry a kilogram in additional weight... it's scary)

Likely the drones will be bought in China where there's zero accountability for exports. They track things only if inside China. Outside they don't care(and arguably would be happy) if parts of the US or Europe gets blown up..

My guess is a city like NYC or London(eg oxford circus) are at biggest risk .. any city really with lots of pedestrians. .. drone swarm over them.. pre programmed flight and release / detonation altitude

Most undergrad EE students could do it with no training. I haven't flown a drone but looking at the material, it seems so easy to program these days that we are really at risk of such an attack..

How would you defend such large areas at all time? You'd need to detect a low flying swarm and have automatic counter measures.

Actually thinking of it.. not even the white house is prepared for such an attack.. sure, likely the president would be rushed underground in time and be safe(not necessarily but let's say they have 3min between detection and first drone making contact, which is more time than you'd realistically have but ok).. the WH could be obliterated by 100 drones carrying just a bit of tnt or even a fertiliser bomb each... the stock market would lose a cool trillion before it would be closed

Maybe the WH has some EMP like defense but I doubt it