Autonomous Weapons Need Autonomous Lawyers

https://reporter.dodlive.mil/2019/04/autonomous-weapons_law/

by mhb • 7 years ago

62 57 7 years ago

reporter.dodlive.mil

paultopia• 7 years ago

This is interesting, but there are difficult conceptual problems with imagining that supervised learning can just be plunked into legal reasoning. I have a draft chapter on this, if folks are curious (or have feedback!): https://osf.io/preprints/lawarxiv/gk2ms

yboris• 7 years ago

Or better yet, autonomous weapons need to be prevented:

https://www.stopkillerrobots.org

cooljacob2042• 7 years ago

Unfortunately that is impossible as much as I wish it was possible. Russia, US and China will never risk falling behind in the field.

Maybe we are about to hit the great filter...

wayoutthere• 7 years ago

It would also be trivial to build one; you can find plenty of homebuilds for airsoft versions of autonomous weapons from the last decade or so.

Pretty sure the day the terrorists (specifically the domestic ones) start building this kind of crap is the day public spaces stop being a thing.

Bombthecat• 7 years ago

I think we did already. It will just take time to materialize .

chris57453• 7 years ago

It’s not impossible. We always have a choice.

fwip• 7 years ago

How dystopian - our murderbots will be held accountable by our lawyerbots.

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

Horrifying.

NTDF9• 7 years ago

All we need now is a simulation to plug ourselves into. And this is how The Matrix was made.

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

It's sorta like AdTech, where machines carefully optimize the ads shown to other machines and blocked by humans, with each layer charging humans for the privilege.

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

Most humans don't block ads though.

asdfman123• 7 years ago

Then the lawyerbots will start moving too fast, too, so we'll need laws written and approved by congressbots.

You know, maybe the Unabomber had a point there...

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

If we can't keep up with our killing machine's actions, maybe we shouldn't have them?

nexuist• 7 years ago

There is a bit of a positive side to this - if our side uses murderbots, and their side uses murderbots...why bother with humans?

I hope, far in the future but not too far, wars are held among the stars with remotely operated or even autonomous starships battling over resources such as meteors or comets. It is in every nation state’s best interest to reduce the human and property cost of every battle.

The need for conflict will likely be forever a part of humanity. The need for death or injury, however, is quickly withering away.

inetknght• 7 years ago

You don't see a situation where one side can mass produce bots and completely dominate (zerg...)? Such a side would likely also force the losing side into slavery or starvation

robotresearcher• 7 years ago

The side that can destroy the opponent’s ability to build, deploy, and develop murderbots will have a big advantage. So they will target the murderbot economy and harm people in the process.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

So they will target the murderbot economy and harm people in the process.

Yeah, you can kind of see the escalation tree. Inevitably, there's a point at which some book smart people come up with the idea to use AI techniques to have the murderbots protect their own reproduction capacity.

I hope everyone who decides to manufacture murderbots is wise enough to keep an "Off" switch of some sort.

ptah• 7 years ago

why not just do it in a video game instead

mLuby• 7 years ago

Furthermore, while human life was "nasty, brutish and short" dying "in a blaze of glory" made some sense, trading just a few years. But as we live longer and and happier lives, that trade will be viewed as pathologically short-sighted.

JoeAltmaier• 7 years ago

In the Middle Ages, I understand that if you survived childhood then the demographics were largely what they are today. Its just that today, more people are surviving to adulthood?

So it never made 'sense' to die in a blaze of glory. Except for the immortality part.

TeMPOraL3• 7 years ago

Because the first party that cheats and starts killing other side's people wins. Settling wars by game (whether a robot conflict, or a videogame) is an unstable equilibrium, because it requires all participants to obey the rules. "War" is generally what we call when a faction throws out the rulebook.

TheRealPomax• 7 years ago

...no? Modern warfare very much has rules and laws governing what is permitted in international conflict violence, and what constitues a war crime, and how severe that war crime is. War is absolutely not "one or more parties throwing out the rulebook". As easy as it is to just murder a city in civ 6, in real life any power that wishes to still be sat at any relevant table during future treaties and negotiations will over those rules and laws unless they are truly desperate. I.e. they have already lost the war, and now it's a reign of terror on their way out.

GavinB• 7 years ago

That's true in theory, but rules of war do have a long history of limited but very real success. The key is to keep a multipolar civilization so that the cost of defecting from the rules (for example, the Geneva Convention) is higher than the benefit of getting an edge in the current conflict.

Even in a bi-polar conflict, the threat of mutually assured destruction helps to enforce official and unofficial rules of engagement. The Cold War demonstrated that quite effectively.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

the only reason people were killed en masse was because they were in the way of strategic interests, and the strategic interests were in the densely populated areas and accessed by land and crude aerial targeting, and the only way to defend these things was to stem the advance using other people.

many of these things are no longer true.

krapp2• 7 years ago

It is in every nation state’s best interest to reduce the human and property cost of every battle.

It won't happen, drones killing drones will never be as effective a means of coercion than drones killing people. Human suffering is what makes war effective.

vharuck2• 7 years ago

Counter hypothetical: Nations have drone-centric militaries. Nation X moves to attack nation Y's major cities. Y notices and sends its drones to intercept and defend in locations away from the cities. If X or Y lose the ability to fight back, why wouldn't they surrender?

I don't see how the decisions are different from our current wars where humans carry the weapons.

onesmallcoin• 7 years ago

What if one community has money to spend on drones, While the other does not? What if both communities have enough money and value human life so they just send endless drones at each other smashing said drones into pieces until one community has enough money to spend on drones and one does not It could be about power, and from what I've seen, the people that come from that: don't like to not come from that complacency is a word that comes to mind

chris57453• 7 years ago

Wars happen due to material and ideological differences. If country A engages country B in a robot war and all the robots die, the humans and the differences will remain.

dawg-• 7 years ago

A big part of war is morale. People have to want to send their 20 year old children to die in a foreign country. No war happens without support from the people fighting it. But what happens to war when that's not a thing anymore? What will happen when we just have a bunch of robots killing each other? Nobody will have any personal reason to protest or speak out against a war. It's the ultimate abstraction.

You could call this a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm not smart enough to figure out which side is more likely to be true.

harimau777• 7 years ago

Historically weren't some wars decided via a duel between two champions? Or is that just fiction?

throwaway7446782• 7 years ago

David vs Goliath, Achilles vs Hector (war did not end); that's about it. My understanding is that this occured only in mythical/very ancient contexts.

njharman• 7 years ago

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

StanislavPetrov• 7 years ago

Most "modern warfare" is asymmetric in nature where one side does almost all the murdering and the other side mostly just gets murdered. It may seem to you that the, "need for death or injury" is quickly withering away but I invite you to go ask someone from Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan or any other country that has been on the other end of it what they think about death and injury.

ajnin• 7 years ago

I disagree with the premise. There are no autonomous robots on their own, there are autonomous robots that someone decided to deploy and target on something. That's just too easy to say that oh, the robots are autonomous so nobody's really responsible for them. "Only robots can judge other robots" ... no, humans judge the actions of other humans. If we don't hold the decision-makers accountable, the descent towards global totalitarian rule seems inevitable.

bloody-crow• 7 years ago

Interestingly enough, dangerous technology has a negative bias towards morality, meaning that an actor less concerned with moral aspects of advancing such technology incurs less resistance in doing so.

If US military succumbs to public pressure and stops developing autonomous weapons (purely hypothetical, never gonna happen), Russia or China will not, and we end up in a situation where the least moral actor has the most powerful and advanced drones.

There's a similar situation in eugenics/genetics and other morally dubious research areas.

alottafunchata• 7 years ago

Man, the references to AWS threw me off

Autonomous Weapons Need Autonomous Lawyers

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