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Just playing the devil's advocate here: * No soldiers of the side deploying armed drones need to be in danger. * Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically

Just playing the devil's advocate here: * No soldiers of the side deploying armed drones need to be in danger. * Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically instructed. Humans do have a pretty bad record of unnecessary cruelty due to racism, boredom, intoxication etc. * If you log all descision making processes, you can justify each action taken. It's like bodycams for police officers. If you'd make all logs public after the war it would be possible to identify war crimes and who gave the order (unlike now). * Nothing requires a machine to use lethal force all the time. Systems which have the primary purpose of capturing combattants can be considered when there's no risk of losing one of your own soldiers. * Your robots priority doesn't have to be self-preservation (unlike a human soldier). When in doubt, don't shoot and analyze the situation. All in all, if the military would use these autonomous killing machines with the intent of minimizing covilian casualties, would this not be an improvement over the current state of warfare? Of course it won't make war per se less likely, but not using these machines doesn't either. So why not use them?

nxzero 11y ago
Starting to think HN is full of sock puppets. Here's a downside, robots don't care about killing the population that paid to create them. Basically, every single claim you're making is false or is easily spun to be a negative.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  The belief that people who don't share your opinions must be under control is a gross dehumanization, and not a terribly helpful way to begin a contribution.
  - nxzero 11y ago
    Understand, fair enough.
danieldk 11y ago
Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically instructed. I agree that in theory, killbots fighting killbots could lead to very clean wars. The problem is that the least powerful party will quickly resort to 'kill and torture as many civilians as possible' as a means of revenge, psychological warfare, terrorism, etc. The ethics of robots will be the ethics of humans. More powerful and effective killing machines will amplify the behavior of immoral humans.
- nine_k 11y ago
  Do you expect the Pentagon be the least powerful party? Do you expect other partiesto stay away from aautonomous military robots if the US does?
vlehto 11y ago
Because any technological advance is going to be countered. Then at some point, we have drones killing drones. Currently military numbers are limited by manpower. And military units (like let's tanks) are to some degree limited by money. You don't want to pour too much money on single tank, because you then put all your eggs on few baskets. And you also don't want to put significant part of your troops in badly armored tanks with food firepower, because then you will run out of tankers in no time. Currently the "good balance" is 10 000 M1A2 Abrams that cost 6,2 million dollars a piece. Those would need 40 000 tankers, which is tolerable amount of crew. Training them is costing and going to cost lots of money. Combined price of the thing is 62 billion dollars or tax payer money, distributed to several decades. Increasing the price of tank to 10 million would be stupid, as it's still vulnerable to certain dangers, but you now lose 4 million more in single blast. Now let's imagine full autonomous tank fleet of M1A9 Abrams somewhere around year 2050. You are no longer limited by tankers. You are only limited by price. But as you lack crew, you need less armor. Lets say we have unit price of 4 million dollars. Now 10 000 units is only 40 billion and zero tankers. Then Russia makes autonomous tank "T17 Kursk" and produces 15 000 of them to sell to China. (Or something else, I'm not fiction writer.) They are bit crap, but as trained tankmen are not required, they can easily produce higher numbers to compete with U.S. But U.S. is not happy with second place. So U.S. gets another 10 000 Abrams. But China is not giving up, they order another 15 000 Kursk. And on and on. Until tax percentages of both China and U.S. reach 70% and all of it is poured to "defense". China, India, Brazil and Russia are all likely to beat U.S. in economic growth rate in the future, because it's easier if you start from the bottom. And they are all geopolitically ambitious. We are headed towards multipolar world and that means arms races again. TL;DR: Autonomous killing robots remove limitations of arms race. This is "destabilizing" and draining.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  People are not the limiting factor on number of tanks. See: the rest of the military. This is an implausible scenario.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    It was simplification. But yes, the real shit hits the fan when infantry can be replaced with robotics. See "combined arms approach".
jaimeyap 11y ago
The more deterrents to war we have the better. Lowering the perceived risks of it seems dangerous and might in fact make it more likely to wage war. You need skin in the game to make you think twice about waging it. I worry the actual human costs could be much higher by removing humans entirely from one side of the fight.
DanBC 11y ago
> * Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically instructed. Well, sure, but have you used computers recently? It's often a fucking awful experience and while the computer clearly isn't trying to make your life frustrating that's often the result. PC LOAD LETTER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8 Do we really want the people who make printers to make autonomous killing machines?
- bad_alloc 11y ago
  Then again, the printer is just not working. It's not randomly printing things you don't want. In the same sense, a broken autonomous tank would just stop dead in its tracks instead of suddenly killing everything that moves. Those failure modes have always been very rare.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...? > In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like: ... wedding parties being hit by drone strike?
    - goldenkey 11y ago
      But they shot AKs in the air as celebration! Only a mistake that kills an entire family tree.
marcosdumay 11y ago
Just to point the elephant in the room and place the correct problem there for discussion: * Autonomous weapons subvert the basis of Democracy, making autocracies sustainable. * Bugs on autonomous weapons can make them much more dangerous, to both sides, even on peace time.
einrealist 11y ago
Your logic implies, that the other war participants play by the same standards. I doubt, that there will be a standardization or approval process for the operating software across all armies, in order to ensure that the robots behave with some "moral limitations".
austerity 11y ago
It's remarkable that you had to preface your argument with "Just playing the devil's advocate here". It appears that the fear of AI taking life and death decisions is so great that merely making an argument in favor of it is seen as immoral. Doubly fascinating is the fact that this attitude has taken roots on HN of all places.
newman314 11y ago
I think the better question is how do we stop war? I think too often the casualties of war get dismissed as collateral damage. I'm for requiring politicians that vote for war to send their offspring into battle. Put some skin in the game so as to speak...

nxzero 11y ago

Starting to think HN is full of sock puppets. Here's a downside, robots don't care about killing the population that paid to create them. Basically, every single claim you're making is false or is easily spun to be a negative.

oldmanjay 11y ago
The belief that people who don't share your opinions must be under control is a gross dehumanization, and not a terribly helpful way to begin a contribution.
- nxzero 11y ago
  Understand, fair enough.

danieldk 11y ago

Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically instructed. I agree that in theory, killbots fighting killbots could lead to very clean wars. The problem is that the least powerful party will quickly resort to 'kill and torture as many civilians as possible' as a means of revenge, psychological warfare, terrorism, etc. The ethics of robots will be the ethics of humans. More powerful and effective killing machines will amplify the behavior of immoral humans.

nine_k 11y ago
Do you expect the Pentagon be the least powerful party? Do you expect other partiesto stay away from aautonomous military robots if the US does?

vlehto 11y ago

Because any technological advance is going to be countered. Then at some point, we have drones killing drones. Currently military numbers are limited by manpower. And military units (like let's tanks) are to some degree limited by money. You don't want to pour too much money on single tank, because you then put all your eggs on few baskets. And you also don't want to put significant part of your troops in badly armored tanks with food firepower, because then you will run out of tankers in no time. Currently the "good balance" is 10 000 M1A2 Abrams that cost 6,2 million dollars a piece. Those would need 40 000 tankers, which is tolerable amount of crew. Training them is costing and going to cost lots of money. Combined price of the thing is 62 billion dollars or tax payer money, distributed to several decades. Increasing the price of tank to 10 million would be stupid, as it's still vulnerable to certain dangers, but you now lose 4 million more in single blast. Now let's imagine full autonomous tank fleet of M1A9 Abrams somewhere around year 2050. You are no longer limited by tankers. You are only limited by price. But as you lack crew, you need less armor. Lets say we have unit price of 4 million dollars. Now 10 000 units is only 40 billion and zero tankers. Then Russia makes autonomous tank "T17 Kursk" and produces 15 000 of them to sell to China. (Or something else, I'm not fiction writer.) They are bit crap, but as trained tankmen are not required, they can easily produce higher numbers to compete with U.S. But U.S. is not happy with second place. So U.S. gets another 10 000 Abrams. But China is not giving up, they order another 15 000 Kursk. And on and on. Until tax percentages of both China and U.S. reach 70% and all of it is poured to "defense". China, India, Brazil and Russia are all likely to beat U.S. in economic growth rate in the future, because it's easier if you start from the bottom. And they are all geopolitically ambitious. We are headed towards multipolar world and that means arms races again. TL;DR: Autonomous killing robots remove limitations of arms race. This is "destabilizing" and draining.

vectorjohn 11y ago
People are not the limiting factor on number of tanks. See: the rest of the military. This is an implausible scenario.
- vlehto 11y ago
  It was simplification. But yes, the real shit hits the fan when infantry can be replaced with robotics. See "combined arms approach".

jaimeyap 11y ago

The more deterrents to war we have the better. Lowering the perceived risks of it seems dangerous and might in fact make it more likely to wage war. You need skin in the game to make you think twice about waging it. I worry the actual human costs could be much higher by removing humans entirely from one side of the fight.

DanBC 11y ago

> * Robots do not act cruelly unless specifically instructed. Well, sure, but have you used computers recently? It's often a fucking awful experience and while the computer clearly isn't trying to make your life frustrating that's often the result. PC LOAD LETTER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QQdNbvSGok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8 Do we really want the people who make printers to make autonomous killing machines?

bad_alloc 11y ago
Then again, the printer is just not working. It's not randomly printing things you don't want. In the same sense, a broken autonomous tank would just stop dead in its tracks instead of suddenly killing everything that moves. Those failure modes have always been very rare.
- DanBC 11y ago
  http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...? > In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like: ... wedding parties being hit by drone strike?
  - goldenkey 11y ago
    But they shot AKs in the air as celebration! Only a mistake that kills an entire family tree.

marcosdumay 11y ago

Just to point the elephant in the room and place the correct problem there for discussion: * Autonomous weapons subvert the basis of Democracy, making autocracies sustainable. * Bugs on autonomous weapons can make them much more dangerous, to both sides, even on peace time.

einrealist 11y ago

Your logic implies, that the other war participants play by the same standards. I doubt, that there will be a standardization or approval process for the operating software across all armies, in order to ensure that the robots behave with some "moral limitations".

austerity 11y ago

It's remarkable that you had to preface your argument with "Just playing the devil's advocate here". It appears that the fear of AI taking life and death decisions is so great that merely making an argument in favor of it is seen as immoral. Doubly fascinating is the fact that this attitude has taken roots on HN of all places.

newman314 11y ago

I think the better question is how do we stop war? I think too often the casualties of war get dismissed as collateral damage. I'm for requiring politicians that vote for war to send their offspring into battle. Put some skin in the game so as to speak...