Pentagon Moving Toward Use of AI-Controlled Killer Drones
Legal Insurrection readers may recall a story I did in June that the US Air Force claimed the reference to a drone controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) killing its human operator in an officer’s presentation was merely a hypothetical scenario.
The Air Force on Friday denied staging a simulation with an AI-controlled drone in which artificial intelligence turned on its operator and attacked to achieve its goal.The story mushroomed on social media based on apparently misinterpreted comments from an Air Force colonel at a seminar in London last month. Col. Tucker Hamilton, an experimental fighter test pilot, had described an exercise in which an AI-controlled drone had been programmed to destroy enemy air defenses. When ordered to ignore a target, the drone attacked its operator for interfering with its primary goal.
While drones killing their human operators are hypothetical, The New York Times is reporting that the deployment of AI-controlled drones that can make autonomous decisions about whether to kill human targets is moving closer to reality, and other countries want restraints on their development.
…[T]he United States, China and a handful of other nations make rapid progress in developing and deploying new technology that has the potential to reshape the nature of warfare by turning life and death decisions over to autonomous drones equipped with artificial intelligence programs.That prospect is so worrying to many other governments that they are trying to focus attention on it with proposals at the United Nations to impose legally binding rules on the use of what militaries call lethal autonomous weapons.“This is really one of the most significant inflection points for humanity,” Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s chief negotiator on the issue, said in an interview. “What’s the role of human beings in the use of force — it’s an absolutely fundamental security issue, a legal issue and an ethical issue.”But while the U.N. is providing a platform for governments to express their concerns, the process seems unlikely to yield substantive new legally binding restrictions. The United States, Russia, Australia, Israel and others have all argued that no new international law is needed for now, while China wants to define any legal limit so narrowly that it would have little practical effect, arms control advocates say.The result has been to tie the debate up in a procedural knot with little chance of progress on a legally binding mandate anytime soon.
This past weekend, I noted that the US Air Force and Army recently sent letters pleading with former service members discharged due to their unwillingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to return to duty. Only 43 of the over 8,000 discharged did so, and the new recruitment numbers are down significantly.
It appears the genius new plan at Biden’s Department of Defense is to use AI-controlled drones, as they cannot find humans who wish to serve under this administration.
…[T]he Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy – including on weaponized systems….Replicator highlights immense technological and personnel challenges for Pentagon procurement and development as the AI revolution promises to transform how wars are fought.“The Department of Defense is struggling to adopt the AI developments from the last machine-learning breakthrough,” said Gregory Allen, a former top Pentagon AI official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.The Pentagon’s portfolio boasts more than 800 AI-related unclassified projects, much still in testing. Typically, machine-learning and neural networks are helping humans gain insights and create efficiencies.
I do not wish to see other countries, especially the United Nations, decide what happens with our military. However, can AI be relied on to discern between all the essential inputs 100% of the time?
Police in the southern county of Goseong said the man died of head and chest injuries Tuesday evening after he was snatched and pressed against a conveyor belt by the machine’s robotic arms.Police did not identify the man but said he was an employee of a company that installs industrial robots and was sent to the plant to examine whether the machine was working properly.
I would be more comfortable with this program if I trusted our government “experts” more than I now do.
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