11 Responses:

1. ennui says:

   6 years ago at 11:59 pm

   or, academics could just stop taking money from the US defense department, but where would that leave the AI industry?

   "Self-driving cars" (AKA Uber's business plan) wouldn't exist without the DARPA 'Grand Challenge'. you can think of it like one of those 'Atoms for Peace' proposals from the 50s. and that's just one corner of the industry. academic AI is largely funded by the US military and DARPA has been wildly successful in pushing academic research in directions useful to the military. it's reason 102(b) why "hard" AI problems (like uh... truly autonomous cars or slaughterbots) aren't going to be solved in the foreseeable future.

   so, nothing to be afraid of. no one is going to make a slaughterbot. but they will use AI to make drones more easily controlled all over the world from military bases in Utah, make face detection fast and accurate enough for automated target lists... all thanks to the research coming of places like Berkeley, or more specifically, form the job-hungry grad students coming out of those programs and without "autonomous" murderbots.

   academics are the fucking worst.

2. Elusis says:

   6 years ago at 12:06 am

   That is actually chilling.

3. Nick Lamb says:

   6 years ago at 2:45 am

   At first I thought it seems like a weird choice to make this video rather than just paying Netflix for the right to show extracts from Hated In The Nation.

   Then I realised that wouldn't suit their campaign at all. The drones in Hated In The Nation are re-purposed. They reveal the awkward truth that as with other technologies it's not about what's authorised but what is possible. The Autonomous Weapons campaign seeks to outlaw robots that have a specific purpose. But the lone nutcase can re-purpose a robot that was never intended to kill and achieve all the same ends. In other words "Hated In The Nation" says this campaign is pointless.

   • thielges says:

     6 years ago at 3:37 pm

     ”... it's not about what's authorised but what is possible”

     That’s a bingo. And also why the seemingly well meaning attempts to keep military grade weapon capabilities out of the hands of lone wolf psychos often fail.

     Better to prevent the basic hardware capable of firing a hundred rounds in a minute from reaching the “civilian” market. Design a deep fatal flaw right into the receiver block which will jam from the heat of more than 6 rounds fired in rapid succession. Do it in a way that no amount of hacking easier than creating a new receiver block from scratch can defeat.

     While that isn’t a perfect solution it does thwart multiple mass murderer workarounds like large clips, bump stocks, and even quick trigger fingers.

     It is impossible to eliminate every possibility. But at least we should make the wall as high and thick as we can.

     • aguy says:

       6 years ago at 10:30 am

       Or just implement sane gun control legislation like essentially every other first world nation that doesn't have these sorts of issues with "military grade weapons" falling into civilian hands.

       I guess a Rube Goldberg-esque plot to put an unspecified, impossible to fix flaw in a critical system is probably the more straight forward solution...

4. Cat Mara says:

   6 years ago at 8:17 am

   Now I know what Peter Thiel faps to...

   • DC says:

     6 years ago at 7:02 pm

     Savage

5. Thomas Lord says:

   6 years ago at 6:41 pm

   The video is a good argument against Google ads, Google search, Apple everything, Facebook everything, Twitter everything, all the data brokers in the ecosystem around those firms, the NSA, several rich Silicon Valley families, tech busses, non-free-as-in-libre software, vaguely cautionary surveillance cameras, and wage labor.

6. J. Peterson says:

   6 years ago at 4:16 pm

   Worth noting the world center for mini-drone technology is southern China. Will DJI get the production contract?

7. k3ninho says:

   6 years ago at 4:24 pm

   Also in related: Peter Watts' (Rifters, Blindsight) Malak (PDF).

   K3n.

8. sn tell says:

   6 years ago at 3:43 am

   3g of explosive agent is nice, but I would very much prefer the drones killing me to be a little bit more spectacular ...
   
   (Hainan Power Grid Corporation cleaning drone)