Autonomous Killer Robots Almost Here: “3rd Revolution in Warfare After Gunpowder, Nuclear”
Mac Slavo
May 29th, 2015
SHTFplan.com
The warnings have been sounded for decades.
It won’t be long now: all the parts and systems to create lethal machines with a mind of their own, deciding who and when to kill without human oversight are conceptually already developed. It is just a matter of time, and by all accounts that time is short.
At least since 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the public has known (through Hollywood, anyway) of the dangers posed to humanity by artificial intelligence, robotics and the computer revolution.
But today, they are more real than ever.
Researchers are issuing a red alert, as the industry stands at the cusp of developing Lethal, Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), an acronym for machines with a mind of their own, capable of cutting humans out of the loop in determining who is a threat, who to target and when to kill. Nature reports:
Technologies have reached a point at which the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades. The stakes are high: LAWS have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
[…] Autonomous weapons systems select and engage targets without human intervention; they become lethal when those targets include humans.
Existing AI and robotics components can provide physical platforms, perception, motor control, navigation, mapping, tactical decision-making and long-term planning. They just need to be combined. For example, the technology already demonstrated for self-driving cars, together with the human-like tactical control learned by DeepMind’s DQN system, could support urban search-and-destroy missions.
The Rest…HERE
