worldnews

3724 readers

79 users here now

Welcome!

We strive for high-quality standards on the latest world events.

The basis of these standards comes from the MBFC, which uses an aggregate of methodologies, including the IFCN and World Freedom Indices, to rate the Bias and Factual Reporting of News.

Does your post fit the standards? Check this thread!

Rules:

Rule 1: No Further Gaza/Israel war posts

Rule 2: No US internal news/US politics

Rule 3: Editorials, opinions, analysis, blogs, gifs, memes, etc non-serious news sources

Rule 4: Non-English articles require a translation in the post or comments (mark the title with the source language eg. [FR] for French)

Rule 5: Petitions, advocacy, surveys

Rule 6: All-caps titles

Rule 7: Old news (≥ 1-Month-old) articles

Rule 8: Unlabeled NSFW images/videos

Rule 9: URL shorteners

The general rules of the sh.itjust.works instance apply!

Thank you.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

goat@sh.itjust.works

Eyekaytee@aussie.zone

eyekaytee@sh.itjust.works

UN warns humanity is ‘dangerously close’ to handing kill decisions to machines (www.the-independent.com)

submitted 3 days ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/worldnews@sh.itjust.works

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross intensified a joint appeal on Tuesday for countries to enact bans and restrictions on autonomous weapons systems — often called killer robots — warning that "the risks have intensified."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Those drones are still very inaccurate compared to other weapons that we use today and are basically just terror weapons. It is an automated killing machine, sure. It doesn't target anything other than a coordinate.

It's the decision by a machine to target something specific that is the moral conundrum. If you give a machine the ability to "decide" to kill one person over another, there isn't anyone to blame for the death. There is a ton of randomness introduced into neutral networks (AI) and any decisions are non-deterministic in nature. You can jam in as many guardrails as you want, but if the ultimate decision is to kill or not to kill, the guardrails do not matter. This spawns a ton of questions about giving machines the intelligence to kill. Even though there is randomness in any conflict, we can get away with calling it "collateral damage".

If a machine decides that a book looks like a gun and hoses a classroom of 5 year olds, there isn't really any accountability if the machine was approved by law. Again, there isn't anyone to blame, which is a huge part of how humanity works, unfortunately. (Side thought: This would get even more complicated if said machine was supposed to fill the role of a protector or guardian.)

Even with the most complex weapons today, they are just following specific directions to hit a coordinate at a specific time. There isn't any real thought behind it even if it is extremely accurate. Once the trigger is pulled, weapon go to destination and the trigger person is responsible.

Edit: I made a fuck ton of edits to add clarification. Sorry if you were an unfortunate recipient of a draft.