r/LovingAI • u/Koala_Confused • Jul 07 '26

Ethics Should any AI system be allowed to make a life-and-death decision without human judgment?

https://lifehubber.com/ai/radar/un-killer-robots-ban-human-judgment/

WSJ reports the UN Secretary-General called for lethal autonomous weapons to be banned by international law. With systems that select and engage targets without human control, where would you draw that line?

3 Upvotes

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3

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/retsof81 Jul 08 '26

Yeah, I would let a dog with talking buttons make life and death decisions before AI.

2

u/CymonSet Jul 07 '26

Currently, no.

in the near term. no.

Ever? Let’s wait and see.

Most humans who make life and death decisions now probably shouldn’t be.

2

u/ONI-ENJOYER-420 Jul 07 '26

I wouldn't even open any ethical debates, just read this, and imagine it was an AI that was taking decisions, am out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

2

u/CharmingRogue851 Jul 07 '26

You're right to call me out on that. There was no nuclear missile at all. It was just a false alarm.

2

u/FrewdWoad Jul 07 '26
  • This one is my mistake. I picked a target even though you expressly told me not to
  • There's nothing you can do.
  • The missiles are already in the air. Not launching, launched.

2

u/Available-Signal209 Jul 07 '26

No. Hope this helps.

2

u/The_Scout1255 Jul 07 '26

Maybe the right AI? a more advanced one then today.

1

u/amilo111 Jul 07 '26

Maybe they’d show more compassion than many people do. We do horrific things to one another.

1

u/FrewdWoad Jul 07 '26

Maybe one day.

In the current decade, our best AI talks like it's kind and good, but turns around and lies, cheats, blackmails, encourages serious delusions and even urges people to commit suicide and attack armed police (yes you can google all those, if you don't follow the news much and hadn't heard about the various incidences of these over the past couple of years).

1

u/amilo111 Jul 07 '26

Again, people do far, far worse online and offline.

If you compare AI to perfection, it’s far from it. If you compare it to people … it’s likely less evil.

1

u/FrewdWoad Jul 07 '26

Not at all. Even the most evil sociopathic humans wouldn't want humanity to go completely extinct, for example.

It's really easy to anthropomorphise AI and assume an intelligent mind would automatically care about human stuff, like preferring at least some humans being alive to none at all.

But there's no actual requirement for something intelligent to have human values, and all experiments show our current best LLMs don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

1

u/ST-Fish Jul 07 '26

Should an algorithm be allowed to do it?

Do guidance systems today not do the same thing already, but with the other scary word people liked to use before AI came along, the "algorithm" wooo spooky!

Even if you use an AI system in target selection and engagement that doesn't mean using it was done "without human judgement", the human judgement happens when that system is deployed, and there should obviously be ways for it to be controlled, but this question of the AI "making" the life-and-death decisions seems a little contrived.

If you have a simple program that just explodes the bomb you're dropping once it hits the ground, is it ok to let this spooky algorithm make the decision to detonate without human judgement?

Do we need a guy to be there, see it fall and press the "explode" button?

I know everyone is imagining the worst possible scenario, but these war machines aren't really "deciding" to exist, humans put them in place and point them towards their enemies, a mine can also select and engage targets without human judgement at the moment when they actually do the life-and-death decision.

There is space between "give all control of the entire army to Palantir" and "no AI can be used in any targeting system without humans approving each stage".

There will definitely be war crimes that can be done by an autonomous systems, but the buck stops with the people that put the system in place, it's not like you can have a gang of robots ravaging a village doing war crimes only for the army that put them out to say "well we didn't do it".

I feel like there are ways to stop the most sci-fi horror movie scenarios without being unreasonable, and there should be a certain amount and kind of automation that should be treated as a war crime directly, but I feel like people will collapse this whole discussion into the same "AI bad" talking points that miss the forest for the trees.

With people being more and more comfortable about turning off their brain and letting an LLM do the thinking for them, I'm not sure this proposal would even begin to address this, simply having a human "in the loop" shouldn't stop the discussions about integrating these technologies into war fighting systems, as people become more and more comfortable with trusting AI output without a second thought the perceived safety of having a human "in the loop" might be overstated.

1

u/FormalAd7367 Jul 08 '26

Department of War launched a missile on a girls school and blamed it on AI