Importantly, weaponized AI need not even be defective to produce the runaway gun effect. Autonomous weapons, by definition, have no such safeguard. Runaway guns are extremely dangerous, but fortunately they have human operators who can break the ammunition link or try to point the weapon in a safe direction. The gun continues to fire until ammunition is depleted because, so to speak, the gun does not know it is making an error. A runaway gun is a defective machine gun that continues to fire after a trigger is released. drone strike in Afghanistan seem like mere rounding errors by comparison.Īutonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre uses the metaphor of the runaway gun to explain the difference. The scale, scope and speed of killer robot systems – ruled by one targeting algorithm, deployed across an entire continent – could make misidentifications by individual humans like a recent U.S. It’s that the difference between human error and algorithmic error is like the difference between mailing a letter and tweeting. The problem here is not that machines will make such errors and humans won’t. (Warning: graphic depictions of violence.) Killer robots, like the drones in the 2017 short film ‘Slaughterbots,’ have long been a major subgenre of science fiction. president’s minimally constrained authority to launch a strike – more unsteady and more fragmented. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could become combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.Īs a specialist in human rights with a focus on the weaponization of artificial intelligence, I find that autonomous weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear world – for example, the U.S. Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 20.
Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.Īutonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war.
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