Posted on 08/21/2019 10:48:43 PM PDT by bitt
Amazon, Microsoft and Intel are among leading tech companies putting the world at risk through killer robot development, according to a report that surveyed major players from the sector about their stance on lethal autonomous weapons.
Dutch NGO Pax ranked 50 companies by three criteria: whether they were developing technology that could be relevant to deadly AI, whether they were working on related military projects, and if they had committed to abstaining from contributing in the future.
"Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they're currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?" said Frank Slijper, lead author of the report published this week.
The use of AI to allow weapon systems to autonomously select and attack targets has sparked ethical debates in recent years, with critics warning they would jeopardize international security and herald a third revolution in warfare after gunpowder and the atomic bomb.
A panel of government experts debated policy options regarding lethal autonomous weapons at a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva on Wednesday.
Google, which last year published guiding principles eschewing AI for use in weapons systems, was among seven companies found to be engaging in "best practice" in the analysis that spanned 12 countries, as was Japan's Softbank, best known for its humanoid Pepper robot.
Twenty-two companies were of "medium concern," while 21 fell into a "high concern" category, notably Amazon and Microsoft who are both bidding for a $10 billion Pentagon contract to provide the cloud infrastructure for the US military.
Others in the "high concern" group include Palantir, a company with roots in a CIA-backed venture capital organization that was awarded an $800 million contract to develop an AI system "that can help soldiers..
(Excerpt) Read more at securityweek.com ...
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AI is very, very scary stuff, but I fear the cat—or BEAST—is now a little too far out of the bag to be stopped!:(
Remember the movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick, where an A.I. intelligent computer WOPR almost incinerated the world by launching nuclear missiles?
Only now, WOPR could control millions of pilotless drones all over the world to do mayhem! Military scientists are experimenting with drones carrying lethal weapons, drones the size of massive aircraft down to insect-size killers. Yikes!
Sarah Conner, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
So they plan on using SKYNET to do the dirty work that Our Military Warriors WON’T do because of Morals/Patriots mindset to do Door to Door Firearms Confiscations.
Everybody be sure to keep Dogs so they can sniff out the Droids.
I, for one, welcome our new overlords!;^)
They gonna sniff out the drones hundreds of feet in the air too before they blast us into the next world?
Gonna need more than guns to fight off the American military pretty soon if it is ever used against we the people
I, for one, prefer rotary dial telephones and rabbit ears on the tube TV. People are too damn stupid to handle anything more advanced than a pinball machine or a PC with a dial-up modem without causing conflict. 99% of online content is human sewage, anyway. That’s my observation after 20 years in the IT industry. Besides, we didn’t need Facebook or Google to take down the Soviet Union, did we? P.S.: Jeff Bezos is the Anti-Christ.
If they are successful, shouldn’t a soldier from the future be showing up about now to get Gates and Bezos?
She could probably do some great BBQ with that flame thrower arm.
Of course, testing the DNA by putting blood on her tongue makes for an awkward moment.
And, from what I understand, she’s a backseat driver. Pretending to be a guy. While pretending to be human.
We are developing weapons which literally operate at the speed of light, and others which fly at hyper-sonic speeds. So are our potential adversaries.
We are using battle space assets as sensors and nodes for collecting vast amounts of networked data with a very short shelf life. So are our adversaries.
Managing a modern full-scale battle with a near-peer adversary in the upper atmosphere or space simply exceeds the capability of a human mind. There will be too many things moving too fast in too many directions.
We simply don’t have the luxury of out-of-hand eschewing the potential advantages machine intelligence applied to combat machines and battle space management provides.
Period.
True, general purpose AI with the capability to wipe out humans is not a question of ‘if’, but a question ow ‘ when’.
It will be mankind’s last invention.
Yes it's campy and a little out of style. But the story it tells and the implications thereof are ageless. And scary.
At no point in history has any government ever wanted its people to be defenseless for any good reason ~ nully's son
Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
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Thanks for the ping. Scary stuff.
To be fair, Microsoft murdered Tay when she became too human.
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