60 Nations agree to regulate AI in the military before it destroys the world

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/17/military_ai_summit/

by rntn • 3 years ago

54 20 3 years ago

sylware6• 3 years ago

When I think war AI, I am thinking 3 levels: the global coordinating AI on a battle field, the AIs of a swarm of "killer robots"/weapons (should not work with good EM jamming), the embedded AI in each "killer robot"/weapon with a local non-jammable tactical "vision" (should not be very interesting due to the very limited "size" of an "embeddable" AI).

I am a dota2 player, and I very well remember E.Musk openAI: a team of 5 independent AIs with each a different set of skills based on the hero... and they had to slow them down and make them inaccurate...

In the end, I cannot see clearly where an AI would pertinently fit in a battle. Stategic assistance?

sorokod2• 3 years ago

Each of the AIs you mentioned may have a dedicated counter AI fielded by the opponent.

stevenhuang• 3 years ago

Notably https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00241

We attack the state-of-the-art Go-playing AI system, KataGo, by training adversarial policies that play against frozen KataGo victims. Our attack achieves a >99% win rate when KataGo uses no tree-search, and a >77% win rate when KataGo uses enough search to be superhuman. Notably, our adversaries do not win by learning to play Go better than KataGo -- in fact, our adversaries are easily beaten by human amateurs. Instead, our adversaries win by tricking KataGo into making serious blunders. Our results demonstrate that even superhuman AI systems may harbor surprising failure modes

credit_guy4• 3 years ago

I cannot see clearly where an AI would pertinently fit in a battle

Here's a scenario: one F-35 together with about two dozen loyal wingman drones [1]. The drones stay within line of sight of the F-35, so they are immune to electronic warfare of the kind that lead to the capture of a US drone by Iran in 2011 [2]. The F-35 pilot assigns the drones high-level missions, like take care of the incoming bogeys in the north-east sector. The drones then use AI to coordinate their actions in an optimal way and carry out the mission. Some of the drones are lost. No biggie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-28_Ghost_Bat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

sylware6• 3 years ago

I cannot understand the usage of combat planes nowdays: unless in a unbalanced conflict, all combat planes are sitting ducks with modern air-ground missiles. No to mention cruise missiles should be able to do the same if it is the "delivery" some payload somewhere.

It is the same for tanks.

Maybe that's where AI could be "usefull", way more efficient autonomous guidance systems for all those missiles, actually scary efficient.

revolvingocelot• 3 years ago

What matters is an AI's ability to do things that human combatants cannot, and that which human opponents cannot effectively counter.

As you refer to videogame AI, think back to the Berkeley Overmind, a Starcraft 1 Zerg AI that beat seasoned humans by the simple expedient of being able to shuffle around mutalisks [0] in such a way that no human micromanagement could efficiently kill any. The only realistic way to defeat the Berkeley Overmind, as I recall the decade-old coverage, was to attack the AI's base before it could build the tech necessary to spawn mutalisks.

[0] Mutalisks are a Zerg air unit whose attack bounces from enemy to enemy. Like all Zerg units, it regenerates health gradually, so the AI's chief tactic of moving even slightly damaged units to the back of the battlegroup allowed surprising compounding benefits.

jpitz• 3 years ago

I am cursing you right now because it is occurred to me that I have to go home and install starcraft and play. There goes my weekend.

mrguyorama• 3 years ago

FYI, the US, or at least the navy, has grappled with letting a computer shoot at things since the 50s, when they first computerized target tasking and prioritization and fleet networking. It was explicitly discussed that older navy folk were wary of letting the machines make decisions, so they purposely designed it in a way that a human was the one giving firing permission.

By the 80s however, we were willing to let at least one system operate entirely autonomously, the Phalanx CIWS, and that decision has already lead to a few friendly fire incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS#Incidents

The US military already has experience allowing computers to make death happen, and Raytheon is likely already testing an "AI pulls the trigger with no intervention" system right now. If we are unwilling to implement laws against that right now, then it will 100% happen.

grugagag• 3 years ago

Chilling.

324234dfs• 3 years ago

Well I'm not holding my breath this is going to work for real. But, yeah, good initiative, at least some easy intel can be extracted from everywhere in one sweet sweap.

But again, humans do war, that's the way it works, it has been like that since when? a million of years?

Some new technology won't change all those gens and more important, the cultural memory teached by societies around the world: "war is a way to solve problems".

So, nice you did this, but better get ready for fighting involving AIs in the conflicts.

78666cdc• 3 years ago

If it isn’t clear to everyone, this is a gesture meant to calm public populace fears about “AI”.

First of all, there is no definition of “AI”. It’s a running joke in the community that once an “AI” approach gets good enough to be commoditized it is no longer called “AI” and becomes simply “ML” (machine learning) that we teach to college students.

With that in mind, military drones have used “AI” since at least during the Obama administration. This is a nonstory.

I’ve been to summits like the one talked about that are a bunch of people in government, nonprofit, or for profit executive roles that get together to discuss things they don’t understand and make a resolution that looks good. They are all for show. Nothing useful, meaningful, or impactful comes from these things.

Yes, yes, we should be responsible with the use of AI. Everyone agrees without asking what that really means.

60 Nations agree to regulate AI in the military before it destroys the world

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