Famous worldwide AI developers agreed not to create smart weapons

Military drones are very "smart", some operator manages only from time to time, and the rest of the time they perform the task themselves

Artificial intelligence technologies are developing at a rapid pace. Experts have taught AI a lot, now its weak form (strong, fortunately or unfortunately not yet established) works in industry, shipping, entertainment and many other industries. But what about military affairs? Yes, here AI is also used, because a predictive analysis of the trajectory of a rocket or vehicle, the actions of the enemy, the development of their own strategy - with all this can cope with artificial intelligence.

But what if we integrate AI of any level into weapons, will not it become more effective? Most likely, it will, and it will be very "productive". But here there are already questions of ethics. Can a machine control the fate of people? Many experts from the technology sector believe, then no. And these "many" recently signed a declaration - a kind of promise never to participate in the development of smart weapons.

Among other specialists who participated in the creation and signing of the declaration are Ilon Mask, representatives of DeepMInd and employees of many other companies, where artificial intelligence issues are touched. According to a group of scientists and entrepreneurs who have left their signatures under the memorandum, it is still another person, not the machine, who has to decide whether to kill a person or not. And the burden of this decision rests on the shoulders of the one who accepted it.

In the case of the car, there is no moral hesitation - the system was sent on duty, say, to comb the country roads during the war, and it shoots the enemies as conscience dictates the computing unit. According to experts, the development of smart weapons with elements of AI can become a destabilizing factor for any country, as well as for its citizens.

The text of the declaration on the use of AI in the creation of weapons was published after the conclusion of the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence), which was held in Stockholm. It was organized by the research institute Future of Life Institute. He is studying the risks of human existence. The Institute had earlier called for abandoning the idea of ​​creating clever lethal weapons. Now this idea has found understanding and begins to spread more and more widely.

Among the signatories - the head of SpaceX and Tesla companies Ilon Mask, three co-founder of Google's subsidiary DeepMind, the creator of Skype Jaan Tallinn, plus well-known in the world of technology researchers of artificial intelligence Stuart Russell, Joshua Benjio, Jurgen Schmidhuber.

Separately signatories noted that their common initiative should help move from words to deeds in terms of abandoning clever lethal weapons. No, nobody is going to organize a revolution, the main task is to show the danger of gradual intellectualization of weapons of any type. "A weapon that independently decides who to kill is a disgusting and destabilizing idea, like a biological weapon. The idea of ​​intelligent weapons should be treated in the same way as biological weapons. "

Here, however, there is one difficulty. The fact is that it is quite difficult to distinguish a truly autonomous and "smart" weapon from one that is not one. A ghostly trait. When a conventional hi-tech weapon stops being stupid, it clears up and starts deciding who to keep alive, and whom to kill? Automatic turret, which tracks the appearance of people on thermal radiation - can I use such weapons? And is the difference between a smart weapon and a normal one great, if the same turret will be automatically guided, and a man - just to press on the trigger?

In addition, the declaration itself was late - about 30 different countries in the arsenal have lethal systems, which with a stretch or without, but can be called smart.

By the way, an interesting fact - the developers of Google in the literal sense of the word rebelled, when they heard that the company is going to develop autonomous systems for the Pentagon. Namely - non-lethal drones with AI.

Speaking of smart weapons and its future, one can not help recalling the science fiction story (author and name, unfortunately, I do not remember) where a reasonable warhead with the level of intelligence development as a 5-year-old child was sent to carry out the task. But when approaching the enemy base, she discovered that there are people living there, the same as at her own base. Realizing this, she decided to report everything to her creator and went on a return flight. The story ends with the fact that the rocket flies into the window of the house where its creator lives, but for understandable reasons nothing to tell does not have time.

Who knows. Maybe in the near future. In this gong of armaments. We will begin to meet terminators on the street.

As when our hero left, he said golden words. Which I'll tell you now "I'll be back." Until next time my friends from Steemit)))