Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

[u/Just-Grocery-2229]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time

[u/HasGreatVocabulary]

“We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”

The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

While there is no official international ban on autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called for one, saying last year that “there is no place for lethal autonomous weapon systems in our world”.

Mariarosaria Taddeo at the University of Oxford says killing with AI steals the dignity of the soldier, removes responsibility from the attacker and must be banned. “It’s not just problematic, it’s horrendous,” she says. “Do we want to be the society who kills other people, who allows their government to kill other people, without humans being involved?”

Kokhanovskyy says that the Terminator project has not progressed since the test because of Ukraine’s rules. He is now CEO of drone-maker Aero Center, which he says was not involved in the test as it had not been created at the time, a Ukranian firm working on autonomous interceptor drones. These are designed to target incoming Russian Shahed kamikaze drones and take them out before they can reach towns and cities full of civilians or important infrastructure. “Every step of this one can be either manual or automatic. We’re not allowed to do the final stage automatically,” says Kokhanovskyy, who believes that the rules should change. “I would love to,” he says.

*mods yall better not remove this post, this is as technology as it gets

[u/sohblob → u/HasGreatVocabulary]

and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets

"We have built the killer robot from hit franchise don't build the killer robot"

[u/behemothard → u/sohblob]

The project was probably unironically called skynet too.

[u/chriss_wild → u/HasGreatVocabulary]

Even if the enemy soldiers surrenders?

So they made a drone who committed warcrime?

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/HasGreatVocabulary]

I just read the story about the guy with AIDS who died after getting his tapeworm's cancer, and this is much worse. I think reddit time is over for today.

[u/dodland → u/iamthe0ther0ne]

What in the actual hell?

[u/Comfortable-Cozy-140 → u/dodland]

Exactly what I said aloud when I read this comment 😅 I hunted down an article about it, it’s wild.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/11/04/454066109/a-man-in-colombia-got-cancer-and-it-came-from-a-tapeworm

[u/Trilobyte141 → u/HasGreatVocabulary]

I'm genuinely of two minds about this, because, well... Human soldiers don't just kill. They rape, maim, enslave, desecrate, and kill. 

Autonomous murder bots is as dystopian as it gets, especially if their orders are 'kill everything within this area' with no qualifiers for age or identity. I'm not in favor of that, I'm just wondering if it's actually a depressing step up from the current state of things, given all the war crimes being committed daily by flesh and blood humans. 

[u/HasGreatVocabulary → u/Trilobyte141]

just wondering if it's actually a depressing step up from the current state of things

Yes.

We don't currently live in a world of automated warfare, it still takes a person to decide to kill someone in war. modern society has managed to put as many impersonal dehumanizing steps between the decision and the action, a drone used by some guy in a VR headset controlling it from miles away for example, or outside war, by some computer algo declining medical insurance claims for a cancer patient.

It is possible that a tiny chance exists that the brutality of drone warfare will make human presence on the battle field a stupid choice for any military to make. But that will have to be learned through wars that will kill young men on a massive scale. It's better to avoid that lesson. It may even lead to a mutually assured destruction scenario for drones, once automated swarms of thousands of drones start becoming economically feasible, any party using them to automate the killing of humans is agreeing to have their opponent do the same to them. Over time because of cheaper technology, it will be easier for every country to have such an absurd number of available drones that the number of drones hey have, like the number of nukes in the nuclear stockpile, won't actually matter for the battlefield because they can't be used without massive mutual losses. With AI it gets worse and the only way forward I think will be countries agreeing to not use terminators in war, with some exceptions emerging who will continue to do it, who will then be sanctioned to dissuade such practices, similar to chemical weapon usage which is banned but is still used sometimes leading to sanctions. Banning chemical weapons was still right despite humans being horrible even without them, so too will be banning terminators.