Some of them don’t know. One of my favorite jokes goes like this:
I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner, so I decided to take a different part home every day, so that eventually, I could build her a vacuum cleaner at home. But no matter how I assemble the parts I took, I always end up with a submachine gun.
It’s from a German short film on napalm called The Inextinguishable Fire. Very short, worth a watch. Holds up.
Ukraine are fighting for their survival. You can’t put someone’s back to the wall and expect them to make the most moral, clear-headed, rational decisions.
What they have right now is Western armaments and funding. What they don’t have is an inexhaustible supply of manpower. And their enemy has a much bigger supply of manpower than they do. Developing more and better autonomous weapon systems is the most rational choice in the horrendous situation they’ve been placed in.
The ultimate moral responsibility here is not with Ukraine. If the world had taken Russia seriously as a threat when they took Crimea, if we had moved to provide serious and meaningful security guarantees to Ukraine and apply meaningful, effective punishments to Russia (like dumping their oil and gas, as we finally, begrudgingly started to do in 2022), none of this would have happened. Instead we threw them to the wolves, and now you’re here wagging your finger at them for defending themselves any way they can.
No, it’s still stupid. We’re gonna be really unhappy when drones with AI start indiscriminately killing people. Doesn’t have to be in the Russia/Ukraine war.
I hate to break it to you but the development of AI weapon systems was always an inevitability. It has been an inevitability since the first ape hit another ape with a rock.
Now we can decide, collectively, that we don’t want to permit the use such weapons. I’d certainly support such a decision. We can treat them like nuclear weapons, something that should be too dangerous to contemplate using. We can work to put in place international safeguards against their use. Those would be good goals to work towards. But they didn’t suddenly spring into existence because of some guy in Ukraine, and acting like they did is ignorant and asinine.
If you’re under the impression that this is, somehow, a one-sided development on Ukraine’s part - that Russia, along with every other major military power in the world, is not currently racing to develop their own autonomous weaponry - then you either have an insanely optimistic view of the world, or you’re a Russian propagandist. The only reason Ukraine is the first country we’ve heard of using such weapons is because they’re in such a desperate situation that deploying untested military hardware directly into battle makes sense. One of the key advantages they’ve been able to hold over the Russians is how rapidly they iterate on their technology, but that advantage comes from an approach of building small production runs, testing them directly in the field and then reviewing the results. They do this with their drones, with their anti-drone defenses, and everything else besides. It’s not a safe, careful, thoughtful way of doing things, but it is effective, and when you’re facing total annihilation you will always choose effective over safe.
If you want to stand up for the idea that autonomous weapons are too dangerous to be allowed to exist, you won’t hear any disagreement from me. But if all you want to do is wag your finger at people fighting for their lives then you really to stop and consider whether this comes from a place of genuine concern for the world, or just a need to feed your own sense of moral superiority.
Everyone can be doing it, and it’s a stupid idea. They’re not mutually exclusive. Fully autonomous AI weapons might be a bigger threat to humanity’s existence than even nuclear weapons.
Maybe we can forgive desperate people for being desperate, but it’s not an issue of morals, but common sense. Escalating to the use of autonomous weapons invites and demands that Russia and other nations do the same. The moral question will be if those responsible can live with themselves knowing they freely chose to bring this horror into the world.
And the crown passes to you.
Russia brought this horror into the world when they chose to invade a nation that was no threat to them. Everything past that point is on their hands.
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.ml
lol
Azov batallion.
Lol.
Is this really what passes for a micdrop moment with the pro-authoritarian crowd?
All governments are authoritarian, that’s literally the entire point of a government 🙄.
They are thinking"if we don’t they will" which is the same reason why we have so many nukes in the world now
“if we don’t they will”
They aren’t wrong tho…
Do you have any evidence whatsoever ‘the bad guys’ were developing GAN AI based image recognition drones despite the extremely low ability for low powered image recognition models to accurately identify toast, much less people in camouflage in a crowded visual environment?
Do you have any evidence
This isn’t open source software project where everyone knows what’s happening. This is the exact opposite. Neither I would share existence of the tech, nor would they
Except one side actively, happily, one could say gleefully shared they were making a doomsday weapon with effectively indiscriminate targeting.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. If there’s a belligerent opponent eyeing you, your best way to ensure peace is to make sure they know it’ll hurt to attack you. If you look weak then they’ll have no reason to not invade. It sucks that things are this way, but it’s been true for as long as humans have desired something from another. This applies from a schoolyard bully to a bellicose nation.
That’s why I never leave home without my napalm and child flaying device.
They’re thinking “Russia has far more men than we do so we need to even the odds”.
This comic is an absurdly naive take.
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Surely the
leopards would never eat my face!AI terminator killbots will never be used against me!If you don’t expect the enemy to forego killbots too, then the rational move is to disable their ability to produce killbots.
If I nuke you first, surely you can’t nuke me.
You can’t turn nuked land into a beautiful tourist destination like Crimea.
Neutron bomb.
More like “our destruction is inevitable, we can have assured destruction or take out chances with the killer AI that at least we control (for now)”.
You take some chance over zero chance.
Just like nukes!
What a naive position of comfort you’re posting from 🤣
Having better weapons than your enemy will make you safer, yes. And when they’ve been trying to conquer you for a thousand years or so, I think that’s a fair approach.
I mean I do have to ask, what’s the main perk of AI drones. IE finding one guy who can sit on a chair and pilot a remote drone, still seems significantly cheaper and more reliable than hope the AI can differentiate a group of school children from a military opperation. (though with the track records I’ve seen of most militaries, probably not much).
Depends on what you are talking about. Using an AI to work out ‘viable’ targets during the planning stage? That’s how you end up blowing up an Iranian girls school. Using AI to highlight vehicles and steer the drone into them after the command is given? That is becoming a necessity in Ukraine, where the jamming and other counter measures make remotely flying drones more and more difficult.
I think the main advantage is the drone, once locked onto a target, cannot be jammed. Both sides have a bunch of handheld jammers, as well as bigger vehicle mounted ones, which is why this and fibre optic drones are so common.
You’d hope there wouldn’t be any school children in the middle of a war zone.
The signals sent between your drone and its pilot can be jammed, or traced back to the pilot.
With autonomous drones, there is no signal.Signal jamming and disruption. The main perk of the autonomous drone is that it can continue functioning after losing contact. That is at least what I understood as one of the main drivers behind autonomous drone usage in Ukraine.
Send 1000 drones to an area.
Program them to understand what different types of targets look like, basic maps, etc.
Program them to know what a destroyed target looks like.
Instead of 1000 drones attacking one target over and over, you get a swarm of drones moving on from destroyed targets and they can’t be stopped by communication jammers.
Ukraine already had drones capable of autonomously recognize tanks, including their type, and attack them at their known weak point. If there are people inside, this can kill them. The only “revolution” here is they can now do it on smaller drones made to track humans.
You can have swarms of drones that gather data and feed it to eachothers continuously, each making decisions individually and as a swarm, like a swarm of bees but million times as destructive, of course.
But it’s just simply that 2 computers can communicate between eachothers so much faster and more efficiently than having humans in the loop
Also this allows far better autonomous operation, quite like sending an elite team somewhere they have to operate with zero contact back home
But yes, it’s also really fucking terrifying thought people have actually built these things and thought it’s a good idea
Isn’t the problem jamming when you have remote operation so the AI doing this self sufficiently does not need a signal anymore.
Perhaps these can be jammed too but this was part of the tech race in this war. It’s why they used fiber glass cables.
Also one guy in a chair per drone is not enough with the amount of targets present. Image recognition and value/hit probability (AI) lets one guy pilot many drones (in theory, haven’t seen that yet) and still have the final say whether he wants to hit the targets it suggests.
Potentially lets you use drones farther too, find and track a target while it’s flying high, confirm the thing manually, then fly below the radio horizon until it hits said target.
Seems clever until you realise Russia can also stick AI on a drone and now you’ve handed them a golden excuse to.
You don’t think anyone else is already doing it now? Ukraine is the magical tech center that is the only one who can possibly invent this? 🤔
The tech has existed for years.
And yet they are the first to use it in open war.
CIWS, Iron Dome, the KARGU from Turkey… Hell you could call mines autonomous if you stretched the definition enough. The cats been out of the bag for years and pretending a smaller nation playing catch-up is a world changing moral issue is just naive.
Yes, I pointed at defensive examples. There’s zero reason why similar platforms couldn’t be offensively used. The tech is here, it’s been here, and just like every other weapon humanity has ever created ignoring it is counterproductive.
Mines are actually a great example, killing indiscriminately long after the war is over. Now we’re getting flying mines and we can all regret it when it’s too late.
And yet they are the first to use it offensively. It’s not my problem you fail to see the escalation that this invites. Good luck when the drones are coming for you.
Brimstone missiles exist; a missile which picks its target itself. Ukraine is not the first country to do this.
Furthermore, if you want the killing to stop, point your finger at the invader, Russia.
Ukraine is literally the first country to use autonomous drones to kill soldiers, full stop. This is an escalation with no ceiling. I invite you to reread this comment in one year. Further, Russia wouldn’t have invaded if Ukraine wasn’t ethnically cleansing Russian speakers within its borders, and not building an army on its border with Russia. Fuck Russia, but fuck the Nazis in Ukraine even harder.
Ukraine had drones capable of recognizing tanks and attack them at their weakest points after losing their signal. They had it for a long time now. That was already a “terminator drone” for the tanks’ crew, but at the time medias didn’t make much noise about it.
Russia still rely on drones connected by optic fibers. They still don’t have autonomous tanks killers, and their drones operators are exposed because Ukraine’s tech has a range advantage: their operators get to stay beyond Russian drones range.
So no, Russia doesn’t have the tech yet.
Let’s see that then…
I’m sure this comment will age well.
This account is 10 days old, you’re just going to delete your comments and start fresh.
I’m just getting started after lurking for years.
Looking back at human history and developing a bigger stick than your “neighbor” has, is a rather safe bet even if just to deter said “neighbor” from using their big stick.
For the autonomous drone point. See Ukraine vs russian conflict. Ukraine is heavily using drones to hold back russia, so yeah those are rather useful.
And as someone living next to russia, i cant wait when we get our hands on autonomous drones as a force multiplier.
So many people seem to have sorely missed the point. A bigger stick is useless when your neighbour can and will use a bigger stick in response. You want autonomous drones? I really do sympathise with your situation, but that would legitimise Russia in using autonomous drones against you!
Appeasement didn’t even work when they were at peace with each other. Why on Earth do you think it would work when they are in an active war?
legitimise Russia in using autonomous drones against you!
They would be doing it already if they could. It’s not like Russia has been holding back.
The last few years clearly have shown that Russia does not need to be legitimized into being an imperialistic, murderous shitstain
Russia has also been using Autonomous drones yes.
And there’s the point, we need an even bigger stick to deter them from using their big stick, which will result in them creating an even bigger stick to counter our big stick, which will result in us creating an even bigger stick to deter them.
Drone warfare is just a next step of that old pattern that can be traced back to the beginning of human civilization.
Now if russia already has autonomous drones, then we most definitely need those and better ones and more to deter russia from using their drones or at least to counter russian drones.
Other option would be to just trust someone who for the last few hundred years hasn’t been really keeping their word on not attacking us or any of their neighbors.
There are limits to that kind of escalation. Like nukes. Or that in WWII both Germans and British could’ve dumped poison gas on a city, but then of course the enemy would do the same. There’s nothing technologically impressive about autonomous drones, anyone could make them, so to make them first is saying ‘we accept a world where this is normal’, and that crosses a big line. If it’s ok for Ukraine to use them, then it’s ok for Russia and Israel. Then it’s only a matter of time before every military and police force use them. I think everyone can imagine how bad that would be on their own.
- If Russia could have pulled that one before, they would have. They’ve already broken every and any international laws, conventions, etc. that were in their way. The only reason they’ve not used nukes is most likely because China would instantly turn their back on them, and they can’t afford that.
- Ukraine is under threat of annihilation and they never got half the support they needed from their allies. Everything you point about “long term issue” is secondary to them because if they don’t keep that technological advance on Russia, they won’t exist to see that “long term issue” anyway. You want them to keep some reasonable limit? Write to whatever representative you have in your country and ask for a massive and immediate support to Ukraine. Had they done that on day1, the war would have been over for years and we wouldn’t have seen that massive technological “progress” in military equipment.
- Nukes were invented during a high intensity war, used, and then countries got reasonable enough to not use them again (so far…). Chemical weapons were invented then banned. Problematic weapons do get banned, though the rules are not always followed. That’s why we need international laws, conventions, etc. These past years they were all but thrown away by a few countries without any consequences, therefore, don’t expect any kind of holding back on terminator drones. They were to happen no matter what, and Ukraine just had the right conditions to be the first to get them. I would be very surprised if Israel was not already working on it.
And nukes have been rather good peacekeepers after the invention of those, so you cant really say that inventing new weapons doesn’t make one safer.
The other person explained it rather well.
But in the face of annihilation, every possible advantage will be used. It’s that simple. Long term and moral consequences are irrelevant, those can be dealt with later, but first one has to get to that later.
If you want to get really personal aka hammer in the point. You can imagine someone who already has broken into your neighbors home and done horrific things and is now breaking into your home and already starting to abuse/hurt/rape your loved ones. There is no police. Would you not use every single possible method to protect yourself and your loved ones? Or would you have philosophical discussion with the invader while they’re raping your wife/daughter/sister or cutting off the balls with a box cutter of your husband/son/brother. Those aren’t even made up examples, those are real examples with videos.
We’ll cross that bridge when it comes, loosing zero sleep over drones that Russia is going to use against me.
Ask Ukrainians.
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Second Variety by Philip K Dick.
A healthy dose of Philip K Dick is exactly what those people need that still think AI weapons are a good idea.
It’s not a question of thinking they’re a good idea. It’s a question of recognizing that global indifference to Russia’s territorial ambitions put Ukraine in a situation where they don’t have the luxury of thinking about long term consequences. If their choices are “Live in a world where we brought about the existence of AI killbots (a technology that is inevitably going to be developed by someone, somewhere, probably the people currently killing us, even if we do nothing) slightly faster” or “Just fucking die”, they’re going to pick the first one. That’s not stupidity, it’s just survival. The guy who cut his arm off to escape being trapped in a ravine wasn’t thinking “But what if I can’t open jam jars?”
Long term thinking is for people with the luxury of long term prospects.
Autonomous systems bring with them the kind of automatisms that should be tempered by human common sense. See “Doctor Strangelove” or the story of Stanislav Petrov for some more cold-war era examples of what could happen when you take the human out of the equation and have machines run the show.
And it’s not AI killbots or death. Ukraine has been doing quite well in defending against the Russian war of aggression with human-controlled weaponry. Even if it were, you can recognize that what you’re doing is bad and still decide to follow through because the alternatives are worse.
But there are people who think these AI weapons are a good idea and work hard to bring them into existence. Not as a last-ditch measure but as the future of military technology. And they should go read some Dick.
It’s a great read too. Short so should only take a single setting but who knows. Likely they will have grok just summarize it.
If we’re not fighting yet, Mm having a deadlier weapon makes the cost of attacking me higher for my enemy, discouraging him. If we are already fighting, having a deadlier weapon will mean I kill more of them than they kill of us.
My enemy having a deadlier weapon makes it less costly to attack me, and makes them kill more of us.
So yes, having a deadlier weapon makes us more safe. The alternative to nobody having it is preferable, but that would require an enemy who will cooperate with me, which is a contradiction in terms.
I think you are confused about who your enemy is and who will get their hands on such drones. Maybe watch “Slaughterbots” on YT.
How will me not having them prevent my enemy from having them?
The point is you won’t have them. Nor anyone who would use them to defend your interests. Unless, of course, you’re the only billionaire lurking here.
If I’m someone living in Ukraine, I may not personally have military drones but they are working to my advantage. Am I concerned about elites controlling violent tools that average people don’t have access to? Yes. Would I take that over an immediate threat of dying in the trenches? Yes. I don’t think it’s hard to understand Ukraine’s line of thought here.
It isn’t hard for them to understand, but they are pushing the narrative that it is.
You don’t need autonomous kill decisions for that.
Russia is regularly jamming drones in terminal flight. The drones are now able to stay locked onto a target and guide themselves in. This almost completely negates the effectiveness of jamming.
These drones are critical to stopping the invader.
If you are upset about it, point your finger at the invader for putting an entire peoples back to the wall while murdering their children.
Now you are moving the goal posts. Being able to stay locked onto a target has nothing to do with autonomous kill decisions.
The Torment Nexus sounds like a great technical challenge.
I guess the goal is to develop weapons so terrible that you “wouldn’t wish them on your worst enemy”, thus solving the problem forever.
They obviously don’t understand what being petty is all about.
A machine built to end war is always a machine built to continue war.
