It’s not a question of thinking they’re a good idea. It’s a question of recognizing that global indifference to Russia’s territorial ambitions put Ukraine in a situation where they don’t have the luxury of thinking about long term consequences. If their choices are “Live in a world where we brought about the existence of AI killbots (a technology that is inevitably going to be developed by someone, somewhere, probably the people currently killing us, even if we do nothing) slightly faster” or “Just fucking die”, they’re going to pick the first one. That’s not stupidity, it’s just survival. The guy who cut his arm off to escape being trapped in a ravine wasn’t thinking “But what if I can’t open jam jars?”
Long term thinking is for people with the luxury of long term prospects.
Autonomous systems bring with them the kind of automatisms that should be tempered by human common sense. See “Doctor Strangelove” or the story of Stanislav Petrov for some more cold-war era examples of what could happen when you take the human out of the equation and have machines run the show.
And it’s not AI killbots or death. Ukraine has been doing quite well in defending against the Russian war of aggression with human-controlled weaponry. Even if it were, you can recognize that what you’re doing is bad and still decide to follow through because the alternatives are worse.
But there are people who think these AI weapons are a good idea and work hard to bring them into existence. Not as a last-ditch measure but as the future of military technology. And they should go read some Dick.
Second Variety by Philip K Dick.
A healthy dose of Philip K Dick is exactly what those people need that still think AI weapons are a good idea.
It’s not a question of thinking they’re a good idea. It’s a question of recognizing that global indifference to Russia’s territorial ambitions put Ukraine in a situation where they don’t have the luxury of thinking about long term consequences. If their choices are “Live in a world where we brought about the existence of AI killbots (a technology that is inevitably going to be developed by someone, somewhere, probably the people currently killing us, even if we do nothing) slightly faster” or “Just fucking die”, they’re going to pick the first one. That’s not stupidity, it’s just survival. The guy who cut his arm off to escape being trapped in a ravine wasn’t thinking “But what if I can’t open jam jars?”
Long term thinking is for people with the luxury of long term prospects.
Autonomous systems bring with them the kind of automatisms that should be tempered by human common sense. See “Doctor Strangelove” or the story of Stanislav Petrov for some more cold-war era examples of what could happen when you take the human out of the equation and have machines run the show.
And it’s not AI killbots or death. Ukraine has been doing quite well in defending against the Russian war of aggression with human-controlled weaponry. Even if it were, you can recognize that what you’re doing is bad and still decide to follow through because the alternatives are worse.
But there are people who think these AI weapons are a good idea and work hard to bring them into existence. Not as a last-ditch measure but as the future of military technology. And they should go read some Dick.
It’s a great read too. Short so should only take a single setting but who knows. Likely they will have grok just summarize it.