Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LarryMullins 1217 days ago
> The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as

The promise is already a farce because autonomous weapons that sense the environment and make unilateral decisions to kill have already been in use for decades now. From low-tech landmines to high-tech ship-classifying CAPTOR torpedoes which fire themselves, a weapon sensing its surroundings and deciding to kill is nothing new.
1 comments
robertlagrant 1217 days ago
It is new. Landmines can be reasonably clearly demarcated. Torpedoes can only be fired at certain things. AI-powered aircraft have the potential to be flying over civilian populations, or at least near enough to hit them with a missile.

And with landmines - they're hideous and we shouldn't want more things like them anyway.

link
LarryMullins 1217 days ago
> Torpedoes can only be fired at certain things.

Yeah, the humans program the torpoedo to discriminate enemy ships from others, and then entrust that classifier to make autonomous kill decisions. How will autonomous drones and missiles work any differently? They're going to be precisely the same; classifiers engineered/trained by humans entrusted to make decisions to kill. They might shoot a city full of civilians, and a CAPTOR torpedo might shoot a ship full of civilians too. It's nothing new, it's more of the same brought to a wider scope than before.

link
robertlagrant 1216 days ago
I think CAPTOR is a deep water anti-submarine device? I agree that a roving band of nearby civilians in a submarine would be at risk, but that's what a war zone is for.

But more generally, I see what you're saying: it's the same problem, but at a different scale - in this case, the scale of "distance from the weapon". Minefields are very localised; underwater anti-submarine mines require a submarine; autonomous aircraft are just the same, but with a much bigger range.

However, I think the range matters. Civilians avoiding a war zone in a ship or a minefield, while bad, is not the same thing as autonomous aeroplanes able to go to a static civilian population and fire at it.

link