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The Next Fear on A.I.: Hollywood's Killer Robots Become the Military's Tools (NY Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/us/politics/ai-military-war-nuclear-weapons-russia-china.htmlArchive page at https://archive.ph/cSmP6
The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, was conducted by Israel’s Mossad using an autonomous machine gun, mounted in a pickup truck, that was assisted by artificial intelligence — though there appears to have been a high degree of remote control. Russia said recently it has begun to manufacture — but has not yet deployed — its undersea Poseidon nuclear torpedo. If it lives up to the Russian hype, the weapon would be able to travel across an ocean autonomously, evading existing missile defenses, to deliver a nuclear weapon days after it is launched.
So far there are no treaties or international agreements that deal with such autonomous weapons. In an era when arms control agreements are being abandoned faster than they are being negotiated, there is little prospect of such an accord. But the kind of challenges raised by ChatGPT and its ilk are different, and in some ways more complicated.
In the military, A.I.-infused systems can speed up the tempo of battlefield decisions to such a degree that they create entirely new risks of accidental strikes, or decisions made on misleading or deliberately false alerts of incoming attacks.
-snip-
“I fought very hard to get a policy that if you have autonomous elements of weapons, you need a way of turning them off,” said Danny Hillis, a famed computer scientist who was a pioneer in parallel computers that were used for artificial intelligence. Mr. Hillis, who also served on the Defense Innovation Board, said that the pushback came from Pentagon officials who said “if we can turn them off, the enemy can turn them off, too.”
-snip-
So far there are no treaties or international agreements that deal with such autonomous weapons. In an era when arms control agreements are being abandoned faster than they are being negotiated, there is little prospect of such an accord. But the kind of challenges raised by ChatGPT and its ilk are different, and in some ways more complicated.
In the military, A.I.-infused systems can speed up the tempo of battlefield decisions to such a degree that they create entirely new risks of accidental strikes, or decisions made on misleading or deliberately false alerts of incoming attacks.
-snip-
“I fought very hard to get a policy that if you have autonomous elements of weapons, you need a way of turning them off,” said Danny Hillis, a famed computer scientist who was a pioneer in parallel computers that were used for artificial intelligence. Mr. Hillis, who also served on the Defense Innovation Board, said that the pushback came from Pentagon officials who said “if we can turn them off, the enemy can turn them off, too.”
-snip-
A bit more on AI and warfare in an interview with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, posted at https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217808832 . Check the section starting at 12:15 through about 13:55. He talks about defense systems set to respond in milliseconds, with no time for human decisions.
