[jagger27]

These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it. On-device autonomy is the perfect foil to escape centralized authority and accountability. There’s no human behind the drone to charge for war crimes. It’s what they’ve always dreamed of.

Who’s going to stop them? Who’s going to say no? The military contracts are too big to say no to, and they might not have a choice.

The elimination of toil will mean the elimination of humans all together. That’s where we’re headed. There will be no profitable life left for you, and you will be liquidated by “AI-Powered Automation for Every Decision”[0]. Every. Decision. It’s so transparent. The optimists in this thread are baffling.

0: https://www.palantir.com/

[mateus1]

MIT spinoff Google-owned Boston Dynamics pledged not to militarize their robots. Which is very hard to believe given they're backed by DARPA, the DoD/Military investment arm.

[arcticfox]

This pledge would last five seconds in an actual conflict, if it makes it even that far.

[jagger27]

Militarize is just bad marketing. Call them cleaning machines and put them to work on dirty things.

[paxys]

Was owned by Google. Then Softbank. Now Hyundai.

[bamboozled]

How would these things be competitive with drones on the battlefield? They probably cost the equivalent of 1000 autonomous drones and 100x the time and materials to make, way more power would be required to make them work too.

Terminator is a good movie but in reality, a cheap autonomous drone would mess one of those up pretty good.

I've seen some of the footage from Ukraine, drones are deadly, efficient, they are terrifying on the battlefield. Even though those robots will get crazy maneuverable, it's going to be pretty hard to out run an exploding drone.

Maybe the Terminators will have shotguns, but I could imagine 5 drones per terminator being a pretty easy to achieve considering they will be built by other autonomous robots.

[JumpCrisscross]

> These are going to be war machines, make absolutely no mistake about it

Of course they will. Practically everything useful has a military application. I'm not sure why this is considered a hot take.

[jagger27]

The difference between this machine and the ones that came before is that there won’t have to be a human in the loop to execute mass murder.

[m00x]

There's a clear task being given to the robot. If anything this will save lives. There are plenty of soldiers that love to kill for the hell of it, at least this will be easy to track down to who gave the order.

[JumpCrisscross]

> there won’t have to be a human in the loop to execute mass murder

This looks like an increasingly theoretical concern. (And probably always has been. Wars were far more brutal when folks fought face to face than they are today.)

[m00x]

Good!