From douglas at publicsphereproject.org Sat Dec 14 11:26:09 2019 From: douglas at publicsphereproject.org (Doug Schuler) Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2019 11:26:09 -0800 Subject: [Ci4cg-announce] Fwd: [liberationtech] Killer Robots Aren't Regulated. Yet. In-Reply-To: References: <070EBF1D-2447-4994-9794-94556A4063CF@warpspeed.com> <51496555-89A6-43E2-95E2-01ECC79973F6@gmail.com> Message-ID: Not for the common good.... ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Yosem Companys Date: Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 9:38 AM Subject: [liberationtech] Killer Robots Aren't Regulated. Yet. To: LT “Killing in the Age of Algorithms” is a New York Times documentary examining the future of artificial intelligence and warfare. By Jonah M. Kessel Dec 13 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/technology/autonomous-weapons-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000006082083/lethal-autonomous-weapons.html Times reporters traveled to Russia, Switzerland, California and Washington, D.C., talking to experts in the commercial tech, military and A.I. communities. Below are some key points and analysis, along with extras from the documentary. Do I need to worry about a Terminator knocking on my door? Most experts say you can rest easy, for now. Weapons that can operate like human soldiers are not something they see in our immediate future. Although there are varying opinions, most agree we are far from achieving artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that would allow for Terminators with the kind of flexibility necessary to be effective on today’s complex battlefield. However, Stuart J. Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote an influential textbook on artificial intelligence, says achieving A.G.I. that is as smart as humans is inevitable. So where are we now? There are many weapons systems that use artificial intelligence. But instead of thinking about Terminators, it might be better to think about software transforming the tech we already have. There are weapons that use artificial intelligence in active use today, including some that can search, select and engage targets on their own, attributes often associated with defining what constitutes a lethal autonomous weapon system (a.k.a. a killer robot). In his book “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War,” the Army Ranger turned policy analyst Paul Scharreexplained, “More than 30 nations already have defensive supervised autonomous weapons for situations in which the speed of engagement is too fast for humans to respond.” Perhaps the best known of these weapons is the Israel Aerospace Industries Harpy, an armed drone that can hang out high in the skies surveying large areas of land until it detects an enemy radar signal, at which point it crashes into the source of the radar, destroying both itself and the target. The weapon needs no specific target to be launched, and a human is not necessary to its lethal decision making. It has been sold to Chile, China, India, South Korea and Turkey, Mr. Scharre said, and the Chinese are reported to have reverse-engineered their own variant. “We call them precursors,” Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch, said in an interview between meetings at the United Nations in Geneva. “We’re not quite there yet, but we are coming ever closer.” So when will more advanced lethal autonomous weapons systems be upon us? “I think we’re talking more about years not decades,” she said. But for the moment, most weapons that use A.I. have a narrow field of use and aren’t flexible. They can’t adapt to different situations. “One of the things that’s hard to understand unless you’ve been there is just the messiness and confusion of modern warfare,” Mr. Scharre said in an interview. “In all of those firefights,” he explained, “there was never a point where I could very clearly say that it was 100 percent that the person I was looking at down the scope of my rifle was definitely a combatant. Soldiers are constantly trying to gauge — is this person a threat? How close can they get to me? If I tell them to stop, does that mean that they didn’t hear me or they didn’t understand? Maybe they’re too frightened to react? Maybe they’re not thinking? Or maybe they’re a suicide bomber and they’re trying to kill me and my teammates.” Mr. Scharre added, “Those can be very challenging environments for robots that have algorithms they have to follow to be able to make clear and correct decisions.” Although current A.I. is relatively brittle, that isn’t stopping militaries from incorporating it into their robots. In his book, which was published in 2018, Mr. Scharre wrote that at least 16 countries had armed drones, adding that more than a dozen others were working on them. [snip] -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to digest mode, or change password by emailing lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org. -- Douglas Schuler douglas at publicsphereproject.org Twitter: @doug_schuler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Public Sphere Project http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good * http://lists.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci 4cg-announce* Creating the World Citizen Parliament http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project) http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book) http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: