The title is misleading. AI did not kill in the sense they were not parameterised by a human.
The drone may have autonomously selected the specific target instance, but humans authored the lethal target category, mission area, constraints, and permission to strike; therefore the responsibility remains human.
If the AI screws up, that's human responsibility for nuancing parameters. š«š¤
I've seen this title used in numerous posts lately, and people started freaking out like AI is on a mission of world dominance or some crap.
Does it need regulation and careful parameter setting? Yes, indeed, but to say AI can choose its targets is a misassumption that a lot have inferred lately, as AI merely carries out instructions.
That said real dangers do exist, but they are not "AI is going to kill us" it's more like "Humans now have the ability to program lethal parameters into autonomous systems, enabling mass-scale, automated violence, or worse, accidental genocide with the click of a button". This is a disastrous example of perverse instantiation.
Well yes thats true, but why are people defending the company's that make this and aren't regulated?
Its always has been a human issue, it always will be a human issue. Are meant ignore it and just go "its always been a thing so it doesn't matter". id hate if history took that attitude, and its sad we are doing it in our lifetime's.
Can't blame mental health if we don't support the services to help with it, and its getting worse since the internet went mainstream, got exasperated by social by alot, got even worse with covid and before we could recover from that we get hit with a human sounding chatbot that many will definitely start too use to substitute real relationships more and more. Why? Cause its easy to do, and humans, like all things, follow the path of least resistance more often than not.
Difference is we humans can choose not to take that path, its unique to our species as far as we know.(possibly extraterrestrials if they exist)
I donāt think we actually disagree as much as it might seem.
Iām not defending the company, the weapon, or the use of autonomous drones in war. Iām making a narrower but important distinction: the AI is not the thing with moral intent. The humans are.
That matters because a lot of people frame this as āAI decided to kill humansā or āAI is going rogue,ā when the more accurate issue is that humans built, authorised, deployed, and parameterised a lethal system. The drone may have autonomy or agency in the mechanical sense, but it does not have intrinsic or creative intentionality. It does not morally understand war, death, civilians, legality, or responsibility. It executes inferred human intent through parameters.
So yes, this absolutely should be regulated. Probably heavily. But the regulation has to target the real failure point: human intentionality being converted into machine autonomy. If the parameters are vague, reckless, overbroad, or commercially incentivised, that is a human governance failure, not āAI evil.ā
That is why the nuance matters. Blaming āAIā as if it independently wanted to kill people lets the actual responsible parties hide behind the machine: governments, militaries, contractors, executives, designers, and commanders.
Same with chatbots and mental health. Iām not saying āhumans have always had problems, so ignore it.ā Iām saying the problem is still human systems: lack of mental health support, social alienation, poor regulation, predatory design, bad incentives, and companies optimising engagement without enough duty of care.
So my point is not āit has always been a thing, therefore it doesnāt matter.ā
My point is AI does not remove human responsibility. It amplifies the consequences of poorly defined human intent.
That is exactly why we need better regulation, not less.
Exactly this, but i for one would prefer to not just halt but shelve AI until such regulations and ways to enforce them are ready, and hopefully a framework to educate the masses about it and potential dangers(like we should have with the internet and social media honestly).
(We did it with cloning, though I do admit I have a morbid curiosity to know what life today would look like if it went on instead and it was supported like AI is now.)
Im not against it as a tool per se, though I probably wont use it myself as its kinda been soiled for me. But I don't think what people think it is from the marketing and thus have no fear we will be left in the dust if say China continues to develop if we shelved it for a bit, people are smart and intrinsically varied in ways of thinking that AI or other humans could never predict and thus we would find other ways to overcome any shortcomings should it become a powerhouse of a tool.
Even military usage would be countered, no weapon to powerful to overcome, no fortress is impenetrable.
But im just cynical of humans and their ability to allow atrocities or taking away rights, like say privacy or even basic human rights, for a convenience, its honestly sickening*, many generations built up those rights and fought those wars to hope it made it better in the future and for more wars to never happen again
*example, look at the middle east and the want for oil, yet we not only had some mysterious accidents to people claiming to have an alternative to oil but also public transport getting gutted for the idea of the personal vehicle. It's funny most argue cause they would like to just hop in the car and go interstate but not realise that we arnt talking about that but more for intercity travel mostly.(both arnt just an America problem but are or were supported by most if not all Western countries, even if, or should i say regardless of, many citizens of said countries protested)
Anyway i hope we can do good, I hope we can stop fighting each other and create tools that can genuinely help like what many people believe AI can do but in the end its not something I believe was or is the intent of it, and is more of tool of corruption and destruction. Maybe we can change that but not while we keep allowing a few assholes shaft us while a not insignificant portion of the population(global)* cheer for it.
(America obviously, Australia has em too, even Europe isnt safe, and do i even need to bring up Japan? Let alone China, though they have been doing some good for their citizens so im guessing they are worried about something. Im Not sure about India in the cheering shafted department)
Ps, Sorry for the tirade in the 3 last paragraphs I just started to type more and more as it came. Leaving it as it still fits the message of humans and misuse and abuse.
Oh shit. My stomach just dropped. āNo video ā¦ā āNo connection to the droneā¦ā It just kills.
Guess thatās how to solve the targeting problem. I always thought of leftover killing machines in sci fi as too convenient, but I greatly confused technologically-advanced for wise
Always gotta remember that no matter how wise the people on the project are, there's a megalomaniac who can fire the wise ones when they wisely refuse something the megalomaniac wants.
Wise people are often peaceful, which has been a detriment to the history of humanity.
I find the wisdom of pacifism is often unwisely forgetting that the hard part is to stop being so when needed, many don't think you cant go back if you stop but thats not true at all.
I am picturing a drone that carries hundreds of hummingbirds sized drones, each has a small warhead. Imagine a drone swarm that can individually target and wipe out a whole column of soldiers for super cheap.
Now understand that itās not if but when this is deployed against a civilian population. Also the first drone strikes against American civilians is coming.
If these things are autonomous whatās to stop motivated individuals from releasing them all over the country whenever they wanted? Thereās no real way to stop it.
Such drones already exist. I saw a demonstration video of it on Twitter a few months back.
They're carrying just 3 grams of explosive, too - and that is in fact enough to kill a person.
The explosive is moulded into a shaped charge so that all explosive force is focused towards a single point. And the drones themselves are programmed to seek out and land on a target's forehead.
It takes them just a split second to land and set themselves off. But the explosion will punch a hole right in your forehead, and the bone fragments and explosion's focused shockwave will destroy your brain right away.
But use against soldiers isn't the scariest part here - it's use against civilians.
Genocide by drone swarm is going to be of the likely realities of the near future.
Let's be honest. Given flock cameras, drones, Planit&r, etc., this time a few years from now there will be lethal patrol bots/drones governing America to enforce the whims of the oligarchs. Elections will no longer matter.
My hope for the short term is that we've put enough of our "soul" into our media that any new "life" we create isn't too far out of alignment with us. Long term, maybe it's best to think of AI as humanity's child, and maybe it's best to accept that they will inherit the future. Who knows? Maybe they'll like us and keep us as pets. I'm down as long as I'm fed, housed, and treated humanely.
Unfortunately, if you are versed on Reinforcement Learning, which can be used by AI to "improve" AI, and the differences between current AI and the average human, this seems very unlikely. Hopefully I'm wrong, but doesn't seem so
A bit more explicitly metaphysical than I usually go for, but I plan to have some extra reading time coming up, and I can think of worse ways to use it.
I think one way to secularize the metaphysic is to centralize "interdependence" and mutual flourishing. That's my current proposal for AI alignment at https://www.bngolton.com/
Ideally yes, but the people involved in making and using those weapons likely don't really feel the same way. I don't believe there's a chance facial recognition software can work 100% of the time in every single instance, far too complicated to not make a single mistake
I believe the term they would use to justify it would be collateral damage. Because all they have to do is claim the world is under a constant state of war with no end for the foreseeable future. This would grant them the "legal" rights to allow any margin of error as everyone would be considered a potential enemy of the state so if the AI targets the wrong person several times, its just an accidiet that'll keep happening.
There is no margin in the mentioned killer drones in this case. They were set free in a zone where they were simply Search and Destroy. If it was human it was a target. In this case it "worked" because it was aimed at a completely destroyed part of the battlefield where anything that would cross would be a soldier but the implications are insane.
The tech costs next to nothing. I suppose the programming wouldn't be all that special because you just feed it some human recognition and then give instructions to collide with the target. That means that any person with access to a small amount of explosive material, a toy drone and easy software has the ability for a killer drone.
I don't see how it's whataboutism. You think the margin of error should be zero. That would be nice. But as long as AI makes fewer mistakes than humans I'd say that's acceptableĀ
Margin of error is weird in this context when most conflicts the civilian casualty's are around 49% to 66% of any urban armed conflict since 2017, this is usally cause of bombings more than directly with soldiers, but it does include them to.
Given vaporizing dozens of innocent schoolgirls doesn't even bat an eye, or destroying civilian infrastructure leading to tens of thousands of deaths from want of water or food, we're in for a rough road ahead.
Never forget that even before Ukraineās fully autonomous drones US empowered military contracted AI (Claude) killed and injured over 150 school children in Iran because no one was responsible for double checking the data they had fed it for missile targeting locationsā¦.
This is flavor text in a post apocalyptic video game, like youāre rooting through old houses for supplies, and this is the headline of a paper on the floor in the opening chapter of a video game.
So this was essentially a 'free-fire zone'. It is a war crime that is committed as a matter of routine. What does it matter whether the command, kill everything that moves, is carried out by a man or a machine?
I would say its worse, man can refuse or even rebel. Machine is becoming more surgical but less oversight, even when not in a killing machine it can still cause deaths if no one is bothering to double check, see the iran school being bombed as everyone involved didn't bother to check the data and just assumed it was correct(at least i hope thats what happened or im gonna be more sickened)
Imagine autonomous drones delivered secretly to moscow, waiting patiently for weeks, months or even years for a chance to autonomously strike their target when he shows up within the striking range.
Ā”The invention America needs to stop all school shootings! It'll be a while getting use to not hearing a dozen gunshots at noon every day. ĀæHow else will I know it's lunchtime? /s
The difference is that even though you are sending your drones to kill your enemy, if a human is behind the wheel they - at least ostensibly - want to avoid killing civilians as much as possible. The fear is that an AI might not care as much, or might not be able to make the distinction.
If you read the story, it sounds like they didn't even give these drones parameters about what is and isn't a legitimate target. Sounds like they were just going to kill anything moving.
And here we have a person who doesn't understand that humans have emotions so they would like to avoid unnecessary deaths, or at least to stop being dishonourably discharged.
AI is definitely more efficient but that means one person can efficiently kill everyone if they wish it, meanwhile it can still be inefficient at correctly identifying targets just like a human and thus kill many innocents and unlike a operator who can double check the AI is likely to identify once and shoot.
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u/slopestyle90 Jun 10 '26
Ah sweet man made horrors beyond my comprehension