Hate to say it but ...

Hate to say it but BRT has waxed poetic about the dangers of autonomous weapons for years as shit happens, paticularly when AI is combined with tech able to kill 24/7. Seems other parties have discussed this topic as well, which puts BRT in pretty good company IMHO.

Robotic weapons that once activated can select and attack targets without any further human intervention are being developed by the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Israel. Often listed as part of the ‘third revolution’ in warfare, after conventional weapons and nuclear weapons, lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) will be unpredictable on the battlefield.

As a result they will be able to target civilians and other protected people in violation of international humanitarian law. Even if they are used in law enforcement situations or during peace time, it is unlikely that they will comply with international human rights law. More importantly, if these weapons violate these important laws, there will be an accountability or responsibility gap.

More than 70 countries gathered in Geneva this month for the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) to discuss the imminent threat posed by these weapons. Twenty nine states, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, scholars and many tech workers have called for their ban.

It gets better.

A UN report says a drone, operating without human control, attacked people in Libya. International efforts to restrict such weapons have so far failed. 

“The technology is developing much faster than the military-political discussion. And we’re heading, by default, to the worst possible outcome.”

Max Tegmark, MIT Professor & Cofounder, The Future of Life Institute

The issue became more pressing this year, after the UN report, which said a Turkish-made drone known as Kargu-2 was used in Libya’s civil war in 2020. Forces aligned with the Government of National Accord reportedly launched drones against troops supporting Libyan National Army leader General Khalifa Haftar that targeted and attacked people independently.

As stated before ... shit happens ...

Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons

Statement of the ICRC, read at the Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, held in Geneva from 11-16 April.

Caveats

BRT has waxed "poetic" about AI, man's open ended tech merging analog to digital at unprecedented speeds as seen by the rapid advancements of Deep Mind and Watson, among significant others, in their ability to solve complex problems thought to be beyond the realm of AI until now. With this being said, this marriage of analog to digital via neural nets has opened up the era of software designing software due to the fact that in order to evolve, genetic algorithms must be able to adapt to the vagaries of the real world at speeds extending beyond the capabilities of human coders, which means we don't know how this tech actually works. 

An artificial neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, similar to the vast network of neurons in a brain. Here, each circular node represents an artificial neuron and an arrow represents a connection from the output of one artificial neuron to the input of another.

A Wicked Problem looms.

There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.

This raises mind-boggling questions. As the technology advances, we might soon cross some threshold beyond which using AI requires a leap of faith. Sure, we humans can’t always truly explain our thought processes either—but we find ways to intuitively trust and gauge people. Will that also be possible with machines that think and make decisions differently from the way a human would? We’ve never before built machines that operate in ways their creators don’t understand. How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? These questions took me on a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms, from Google to Apple and many places in between, including a meeting with one of the great philosophers of our time.

There's a mystery afoot ...

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully, “but we don’t know how they work.”

Questions, questions.

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better then human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. - Theodore Kaczynski

Almost 20 years ago, Bill Joy wrote an essay titled Why the Future doesn't Need Us. a thought provoking piece to the max.

To whit:

Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new—in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology—pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once—but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

Think about this in terms of autonomous weaponized bots, Musk, Hawking and the military certainly have.

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

It's already happening ...

The reality today is that artificial intelligence is leading us toward a new algorithmic warfare battlefield that has no boundaries or borders, may or may not have humans involved, and will be impossible to understand and perhaps control across the human ecosystem in cyberspace, geospace and space (CGS). As a result, the very idea of the weaponization of artificial intelligence, where a weapon system that, once activated across CGS, can select and engage human and non-human targets without further intervention by a human designer or operator, is causing great fear.

The thought of any intelligent machine or machine intelligence to have the ability to perform any projected warfare task without any human involvement and intervention -- using only the interaction of its embedded sensors, computer programming and algorithms in the human environment and ecosystem -- is becoming a reality that cannot be ignored anymore.

Skynet anyone?

What could possibly go wrong?

ROBOT CANNON KILLS 9, WOUNDS 14

We're not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic – picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday."

Other reports have suggested a computer error might have been to blame. Defence pundit Helmoed-Römer Heitman told the Weekend Argus that if “the cause lay in computer error, the reason for the tragedy might never be found."

In conclusion ...

Facebook Shuts Down AI Robot After It Creates Its Own Language
When English wasn't efficient enough, the robots took matters into their own hands.

Open ended indeed.

The Sea Hunter, developed by DARPA, has launched the Navy down a path of developing a fleet of unmanned ships that could upend the way the Navy has fought since the Cold War. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Addendum: 

US Navy moves toward unleashing killer robot ships on the world’s oceans

Enter: the rise of the machines.

Boxall’s plan to develop and unleash unmanned killer robot ships is an integral part of the Navy’s new tactics to counter Chinese maritime advancements and, to a more limited extent, those of Russia.

Any questions?

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” ― Anonymous

Autonomous bots are becoming an ominous reality as there is too much money to be made by building and selling this hardware to interested parties as seen by this piece in New Atlas titled Kalashnikov’s new autonomous weapons and the “Terminator conundrum”

Earlier this month, the Russian weapons manufacturer Kalashnikov Group made a low-key announcement with frightening implications. The company revealed it had developed a range of combat robots that are fully automated and used artificial intelligence to identify targets and make independent decisions. The revelation rekindled the simmering, and controversial, debate over autonomous weaponry and asked the question, at what point do we hand control of lethal weapons over to artificial intelligence?

It gets better or ... MY DRONESKI JUST ATE YOUR ETHICS

The question of autonomous, lethal robots presents us with a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, in which uncertainty regarding other players’ decisions drives us to pursue a sub-optimal strategy in order to avoid the most damaging outcome. Consider a game with two combatants who have two possible strategies for using lethal robots in a contest: full autonomy and human control. (We categorize any human interventions in the robot’s decision-making as human control, even if the human’s role is limited to approving the release of a weapon.) Neither side seeks to create humanity’s future robot overlords, so full autonomy is an unappealing strategy given the risk (however small it may seem) that humans could lose control over fully autonomous weapons.

However, maintaining human control exposes players to other disadvantages that may be decisive should the other player opt for full autonomy. First, fully autonomous systems could operate in a much faster decision cycle than human-in-the-loop systems. An inferior platform can defeat a superior one if the inferior platform can, to borrow a phrase from John Boyd, get inside its enemy’s decision loop. This places a manned, semi-autonomous future force at significant risk when encountering a fully autonomous first echelon or defensive screens of a less scrupulous enemy.

Something to consider don't you think?

We have it under control ...

Anduril’s autonomous air vehicle, Fury, which recently began production at the company’s new factory outside Columbus, Ohio.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times

For years, yours truly has waxed "poetic" about autonomous weapons as this tech can and has gone sideways on numerous occasions because the question to ask is, who is the enemy because if the ID or circumstances of a given situation is incorrectly analyzed, bad things happen.

U.S. officials pushed domestic defense companies to step up. Last month, Anduril, a defense technology start-up in California, began manufacturing A.I.-backed, self-flying drones that appeared similar to the ones shown in China. Production at a factory outside Columbus, Ohio, started three months ahead of schedule, part of an effort to close the gap with China, one defense official said.

China’s military display and the U.S. countermove were part of an escalating global arms race over A.I.-backed autonomous weapons and defense systems. Designed to operate by themselves using A.I., the technology reduces the need for human intervention in decisions like when to hit a moving target or defend against an attack.

In recent years, many nations have quietly engaged in a contest of one-upmanship over these arsenals, including drones that identify and strike targets without human command, self-flying fighter jets that coordinate attacks at speeds and altitudes that few human pilots can reach, and central systems run by A.I. that analyze intelligence to recommend airstrike targets quickly.

The problem

In Washington, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who had previously worked in intelligence at the Defense Department, was assessing whether A.I. could solve a more immediate problem. The U.S. military was collecting so much data — drone footage, satellite imagery, intercepted signals — that nobody could make sense of it all.

The "solution"

In 2019, Palantir, a data analytics company co-founded by the tech investor Peter Thiel,
took over Maven. 

The dataset

“The four years of brutality on the battlefield in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the world,”
said Mr. Horowitz, the former Pentagon official.

The money

In recent months, Ukraine began sharing its troves of battlefield data with Palantir and other firms
so A.I. systems can better learn to fight wars.

A drone mother ship that can launch swarms of smaller drones, shown at the 2024 Zhuhai Airshow.

Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters

Yet deterrence assumes rationality, while A.I. weapons are designed to move faster than human reason. In exercises dating to 2020, researchers explored how autonomous systems could accelerate escalation and erode human control — with some alarming results.

In one scenario, a system operated by the United States and Japan responded to a missile launch from North Korea by autonomously firing an unexpected counterattack.

“The speed of autonomous systems led to inadvertent escalation,” said the report by analysts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization that works with the military.

Jack Shanahan, a retired lieutenant general and former director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said A.I. would put “even more emphasis on moving faster and faster.”
Credit...Artur Widak/Anadolu, via Getty Images

General Shanahan, who retired from the military in 2020 and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, said the race he had helped start kept him up at night. Governments must set clear boundaries before the technology outruns their control, he said.

Read the entire NYTimes piece to see why tech, like creativity, has no morality.
Remember, as per quantum mechanics, there is no certitude.

I warned you ...

A “terminator” From The Future. Credit: The Terminator |
The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Yours truly talked about autonomous weapons for years as entities most dangerous as we don't know how AI works. Never have, never will as code must write code in order for the system to react to the real world in real time, something James Cameron capped on when creating Skynet and the terminator back in 1984 for his film,
The Terminator.

In an interview with CTV News, acclaimed director James Cameron revisited the dystopian warnings of his 1984 film Terminator—this time, not as science fiction, but as a very real concern about where military artificial intelligence is headed. And while it might sound dramatic coming from Hollywood, the parallels he draws are echoing louder in today’s geopolitical and technological climate.

Cameron’s quote—“I warned you in 1984, guys, and no one listened”—may seem like a line fit for a movie trailer, but it reflects his growing anxiety about AI technologies being weaponized. In Terminator, the AI system Skynet launches a nuclear war after becoming self-aware. At the time, this plot was pure fiction. Today, researchers and defense experts are increasingly worried that autonomous weapon systems could act with little to no human oversight.

This concern isn’t coming out of nowhere. A 2023 study by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) warned of a global trend toward lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). These systems, capable of identifying and engaging targets without human control, are being actively developed or deployed in at least nine countries.

Cameron argues that this regulatory gap is precisely where the danger lies. “We could be building the tools of our own destruction,” he said, urging world governments to establish firm ethical boundaries before such technologies become normalized.

Hope he's right but regulating AI won't happen because if you don't know how it works,
you can't.

Skynet looms ...

BRT has posted many blurbs about autonomous weapons,  an AI-driven tech becoming commonplace given just how little money it takes to build lethal hardware not imagined just one year ago.

When developing machines that can make own decisions – typically called autonomous systems – the ethical questions that arise are arguably more concerning than those in object recognition. AI-enhanced autonomy is developing so rapidly that capabilities which were once limited to highly engineered systems are now available to anyone with a household toolbox and some computer experience.

Using a variety of techniques, autonomous drones are already a threat. They have been caught dropping explosives on U.S. troops, shutting down airports and being used in an assassination attempt on Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. The autonomous systems that are being developed right now could make staging such attacks easier and more devastating.

Ask the Houthis how effective this tech was against the Saudi oil refineries.

Skynet looms ...

Consider the following wartime scenario: Hoping to spare the lives of soldiers, a country deploys an autonomous weapon to wipe out an enemy force. This robot has demonstrated military capabilities that far exceed even the best soldiers, but when it hits the ground, it gets confused. It can’t distinguish the civilians from the enemy soldiers and begins taking innocent lives. The military generals desperately try to stop the robot, but by the time they succeed it has already killed dozens.

Who is responsible for this atrocity? Is it the commanders who deployed the robot, the designers and manufacturers of the robot, or the robot itself?

End game: We have already lost control because we don't know how the AI driving the tech works.

Interesting is it not?

The Terminator doing backflips et al ...

Skynet

"It wasn't a fair universe, nor a kind one. If there was a God, his love and forty-five cents would buy you coffee. No one seemed to be at the cosmic controls anymore. It was every man for himself, until SKYNET became alive and filled the void left by a seemingly disinterested God. Its vision was very controlled. The ultimate dream of man, carried out by one of man's lowliest tools; eliminate evil men. But there was a touch of evil in all men, and SKYNET was having trouble separating the worst of them out. So the totality of humanity, with all of its biologic messiness, wasn't wanted. And to this machine-god, forgiveness just did not compute. Only cold retribution for the sins of the past." - Frakes, Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Skynet, the fictional neural net software construct that propelled Arnold's career into the stratosphere (With the aid of James Cameron) in The Terminator & Terminator 2, Judgment Day, continues to fascinate (and worry) techies like me because we see what happens when computers are integrated with weapons to build intelligent systems with the capability to kill with unprecedented ease. (See Future Weapons & Robot Cannon as reference)

After that, check out an otherwise excellent article unfortunately titled, Killer Robots Pose Latest Threat To Humanity to see why.

"Over 4,000 robots are currently deployed on the ground in Iraq and by October 2006 unmanned aircraft had flown 400,000 flight hours. Currently there is always a human in the loop to decide on the use of lethal force. However, this is set to change with the US giving priority to autonomous weapons - robots that will decide on where, when and who to kill."

[after learning of the Doomsday Machine]
President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you *build* such a thing?

Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.

President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.

Full On ...

Photograph/Getty Images

Well, the military is full on in creating Skynet now that autonomous control of armed bots is in play as per a Darpa exercise when AI became the untethered entity running swarms of cheap and potentially lethal tech beyond direct control of humans, an issue BRT has talked about for quite some time.

Helena Bonham Carter as Skynet, under the guise of the late Dr. Serena Kogan on a monitor, with Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright.

LAST AUGUST, SEVERAL dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings.

So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.

The mission was just an exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon; the robots were armed with nothing more lethal than radio transmitters designed to simulate interactions with both friendly and enemy robots.

Just a matter of time as to when they become armed.

The drill was one of several conducted last summer to test how artificial intelligence could help expand the use of automation in military systems, including in scenarios that are too complex and fast-moving for humans to make every critical decision. The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed.

Any questions?

The Ministry of Silly Walks vs A man with integrity/Maybe ...

Dario Amodei CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

There comes a time in everyone's life where you either fish or cut bait. For Amodei, he became a fisherman. Yours truly is not easily impressed but his stand against Pentagon Pete's incoherent demands to turn Claude into a possible Terminator speaks volumes about the ethics of this man. This might the turning point against the Trump Administration as it only takes one to start a revolution or to show people what it means to have integrity and encourage people to state we have had enough of this insanity against the civil rights of the people and it's time to change NOW. Amodei just might the the guy. 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday that the artificial intelligence company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s demands to allow unrestricted use of its technology, deepening a public clash with the Trump administration that is threatening to pull its contract and take other drastic steps by Friday.

The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations but that new contract language received from the Defense Department “made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.”

So now, the Minister of Silly Walks, Pete Hegseth has to make coherent his argument regarding Anthropic by either labeling Anthropic as a “supply chain risk.” in the same category as a software company connected to a hostile nation, (think China and Huawei) which destroys Anthropic as a viable company or declare Anthropic’s AI to be so vital that DOD will use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force the company to turn over their tech as this is essential to maintain the security of the United States. 

Typical silly walk gait with instructions.

Jazeen Hollings (User talk:JazHol) - Own work

This Sentence is false. 

Either Anthropic is a risk to DOD and needs to be ousted 

OR their tech is so vital that total access to the tech is required. 

It can't be both. 

John Cleese as a civil servant in the halls of the Ministry

Why the Ministry of silly walks? 

Well, there are three axioms in life. 

1. It takes intelligence to have vision. 
2. Vision is not required to be intelligent. 
3. Intelligence does not guarantee competency.

Pete went to Princeton. Was the publisher of the Princeton Tory, which meant he got good boards and is intelligent. Articulate, good looking and confident, maybe, but in terms of being a credible Defense Secretary, The Peter Principle applies as he has truly reached his level of incompetence. 

Any questions?

Update ... 

In a post on Truth Social, President Trump said the U.S. government will stop using the AI-company Anthropic's products.

The decision came following a dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over whether the company could prohibit its tools from being used in mass surveillance of American citizens or to create autonomous weapon systems.

"The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution," said Trump in his post. "Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology. We don't need it, we don't want it, and will not do business with them again!"

Additionally ... Trump would “NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” That decision, he said, “belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.”

So sayeth the POTUS, a stable genius for the ages.

It's official 

The Pentagon is designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk
after President Trump directed all federal agencies
to stop using the company’s technology in a bitter feud.

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner
that does business with the United States military
may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a post on X.

Update II. Anthropric just caved but Dario is beginning to fish again.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source; Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images

Now, Anthropic may be heading down the same path of its rivals. On Tuesday, it revealed a new version of its Responsible Scaling Policy that drops its core safety commitment first made in 2023: to stop training and refuse to deploy an AI system if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper safety guardrails in place that met stringent internal standards.

The new sentiment among the company’s leadership is that this has become an unneeded chain around its foot.

“We felt that it wouldn’t actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models,” Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME in an interview. “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments… if competitors are blazing ahead.”

The updated policy, it’s fair to say, flagrantly contradicts the organization’s entire raison d’etre. 

Click here to read the paper.

Sgt. Chatbot

Aitor Diago

Yours truly has waxed poetic about autonomous AI driven weapons for years as an example of war porn brought to the highest degree of imperfection as the question to ask is, can you properly identify the enemy? Pattern recognition isn't good enough, neither is prediction based on said patterns as humans, who are also error prone, can at least add some kind of meaning to what they see in terms of possible enemy action brought against them by some combat force. The advantage of AI is reaction time, precision and the ability to scale but mapping this tech to true intelligence is something all together different.

Rise of the Killer Chatbots

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches
—controlled by, of all things, a large language model.

At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border—exact location: classified—the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

The sun burned my eyes, so I turned to a nearby computer monitor under a dusty tarp. With a few keyboard clacks, a fifth aircraft appeared on the edge of the screen, its outline looking suspiciously like that of a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter. A young man named Colby, wearing a black baseball hat and sunglasses, gave the order to deal with the computer-simulated bogey: “Mustang intercept.” That’s when AI stepped in. A model similar to the one that powers ChatGPT parsed the command, spoke with the drones, and then responded in a dispassionate female voice: “Mustang collapsing.” Within about a minute, the drones had converged on the target and then, with minimal fuss—and virtual missiles—destroyed it.

Anduril’s demo illustrates how eagerly the defense industry is experimenting with new forms of AI. The startup is developing a larger autonomous fighter for the US Air Force, designed to fly alongside crewed jets, through a project called Fury. Many of these systems are already autonomous, thanks to older AI tech, but the idea is to incorporate aspects of LLMs into the chain of command, to relay orders and surface useful information to pilots. Sergeant Chatbot at your service.

Emergence

Implications ...

For years, BRT has discussed the specter of autonomous weapons and what they could mean for the future of mankind as the AI driving said tech directly echoes what Bill Joy so eloquently warned us about in Why the Future Doesn't Need Us in describing how technological disciplines like AI are capable of going sideways, something most disquieting in light of nations striving to build advanced weaponry based on code we will never fully understand. The terrific Netflix video, UNKNOWN: Killer Bots, takes a balanced view on this topic with fanboys waxing poetic about the emergent capabilities of these systems in "defending America" while others discuss just how easy it is to convert AI from doing good to doing bad by changing just one 0 to 1 as seen in a BRT blurb titled Duh. 

Shakespeare's The undiscovered country quote applies as does Opening Pandora's Box.

In The Profit Motive, yours truly asks ... What is the survivability rate of civilizations living on rocky planets reaching the level of tech we have if the same laws of physics apply to said planets as plundering one's home similar to how we are doing to earth in order to amp up said civilizations seems to be a no-brainer AKAICT. 

Addendum, more than ever, this existential question centers not only on the implications of AI but also on the 900lb gorilla known as GW as both have the ability, along with nuclear war, to end civilization as we know it.

Think Black Mirror, I know I have.